I was down at Potsdammer Platz Friday night with Robbie, some other students from the Berlin program, and a few of their visiting friends, watching the Olympic opening ceremonies on the JumboTron they’ve got in the Sony Center. The show was pretty cool, and only one person gave us trouble about cheering for the American team (as if the divers and the high jumpers had just come back from personally bombing). Anyway, it finished a little after 11 Berlin time, and people were getting ready to go their separate ways, and I wanted a snack before I took off. I knew there was a Dunkin Donuts on the main street just outside the courtyard we were sitting in, so I wandered over there for a late night glazed chocolate treat. Now this particular donut establishment was a franchise of a big, multinational company, was situated right in the middle of one of the city centers, in a city where going out until after sunrise is de rigueur no less, and that even had an internet cafĂ© on the second floor. And the Dunkin Donuts chain, as those of you familiar with it will know, is particularly proud of its coffee, a drink that tired people use to stay awake. So it didn’t even occur to me to doubt that the place would be open. It’s exactly the kind of store a reasonable person would expect to see open 24/7, closing only on Sundays and the occasional holiday. But no. This centrally-located, coffee-hawking, internet-service-providing junk food outlet had not a single donut to sell at 11:30 on a Friday. There were none forthcoming, either, so it wasn’t like I’d caught the tail end of a Donut Run, where everyone stampedes to withdraw their savings in the form of pastry before the currency collapses.
This was dumbfounding, and launched an immediate discussion about German late-night eating behavior. Did any of those club-hopping twentysomethings ever get hungry or stop for a midnight snack? And if not, where did they get their energy from? Can they absorb it like plants from flashing disco lights, or perhaps convert the sonic poundings of their curious electronic music into life-giving carbohydrates? What do they do at four in the morning when they’ve been up all night an have a craving for a J-Box chicken sandwich? There’s no dollar menu to be found. These revelations were so deep and startling, I despaired that I would ever be able to explain them in my two remaining weeks in the country. Such a prophecy of failure would be self-fulfilling, and I chastened myself for my lack of faith and resolved to redouble my efforts. I would get to the bottom of this mystery.
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