Living in a Wintery City

Although I have never lived anywhere with a proper winter, I always assumed I would love it.  I do.  I wish I could live somewhere that is this cold all year.  There are a lot of advantages: you never have to worry about keeping your lawn green, cut or weed-free, and yet, it's still beautiful.  People don't worry so much about what they look like - everyone looks like a 300 pound bear when they are wearing their winter clothes, so whether you do Pilates every morning, or eat pie, no one knows.  In fact, the pie helps keep you warm.  People drink a lot of hot wine to keep warm.  Here it's called Glühwein, but it is basically mulled wine + anise + cardamom.  People eat a lot of cookies and cakes in the cold weather, which means that I get to bake all the time.  People here own their own ice skates; I wish I had ice skates - and knew how to skate - and play hockey.  In the winter, young children are picked up by their parents with sleds.  Two or three small children climb on the sled and the parents just pull them home.  There is a really good coffee shop near our apartment where a lot of parents go.  The other day M saw multiple parents park their strollers, with kids inside, out on the sidewalk while the parents went in and got coffee.  It is nice that people aren't worried about child-snatchers here.  Obviously there are downsides to everything about Winter, but it's still the best season.

M likes to look super cool when waiting for a train.

But the other day he made really some delicious Murgh Palak:

I have been taking some pictures of Weinachtsmärkte (Christmas markets), unfortunately my camera is not very good in low lighting, so you all'll have to make do.  Weinachtsmärkte are set up from the end of November thru the first week of January and consist of booths where people sell handmade winter things, Bratwursts, Glühwein, and there are carollers, pony rides, loads of Christmas lights, and games for kids.

We tried (and loved) roasted chestnuts (Kastanien).

what google translate is for.

The "awful" german language is actually quite entertaining. Go to google translate, paste

pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch

Select from German to German, and hit "Listen." Voila, instant beatbox. Here is the original, thanks to Stafan:

http://gizmodo.com/5701485/how-to-make-google-translate-your-own-personal-beat-boxer

Our german classes are ending for the Weihnachts break. This is Christmas. We learned a lot of stuff, like past tense! This is important for when your friend says, what did you do this weekend? Then you don't have to say, I am going to the movies. I went!

Actually, I did go to the movies lately, to see Harry Potter. Surprisingly, dim memories of the book were enough to let me understand the movie even though it was dubbed into German. I learned how to say magic, "zauber." It was very educational.

We also went to KaDeWe the other day. That stands for Kaufhaus des Westens, or Department Store of the West. As far as I can tell it was basically built to rub it in the face of the east germans that the west was way better. It's practically (though I think not actually) within sight of the wall.

And it snowed! I know you guys in Oregon got a bunch of snow too, but I bet you didn't get -10 deg. C. I think we will have that tomorrow. Woo!

Jazzmusik

Last night we went out to a jazz club with our friend Noah. He plays guitar, and he came to Berlin from Israel hoping to make it pay. On Tuesdays this club has a jam session, and it was packed. There wasn't even room to lift your beer bottle up to your mouth to drink! The music was really great though. A lot of musicians there know each other already, but quite a few of them are new each week and everyone takes turns and lets the others on stage. There were a lot of people from America there too, mostly from New Orleans and Georgia. And on their year abroad from college. Those are the ones to watch out for.

Anyway, here's Noah playing guitar, shot from my iphone in a tiny dark room.

Can you see all the cigarette smoke too? There is no law in Berlin about which buildings you can smoke inside of, so it's up to business owners. We secondhand smoked until the wee hours...I think we got home around 3. Noah didn't make it to his German class this morning--I guess he stayed out a lot longer than we did. I guess a lot of the guys at the club don't have day jobs. My day job was a little tough today, but it was worth it.

Here's to next Tuesday!

What is that spinning thing?

It makes a strange noise.

Deutsche Kurse

Yesterday I started learning German again, and I remembered how weird it is. The verbs go in all kinds of strange places! Like, you might say to someone, "You can go swimming," but I have to say "Du kannst schwimmen gehen." It gets even more confusing when you have compound sentences.

Now Triffid is in two German classes! She is going to catch up to me pretty fast. We are both in classes at my institute and she also has her group at the Volkshochschule, which is a long way to say community college.

back!

We did so much lately! And I didn't blog any of it, so now I will make up for all that.

What first? Well, we went to a softball tournament in Bochum which is in the west near the Holland border. Bochum is a nice enough town, but no one really likes it there because it used to be a coal mining city. Not only are there no coal jobs left, but the whole area was smashed to bits in the war (worse even than Berlin, if that's imaginable) and so there is a lot of pretty bleak 50s and 60s era architecture. But, as typical for Germany, we had clear cold blue fall days and a lot of games.

You nay have read in the paper about the 20th anniversary of the Einheit, re-unification. We went to a celebration in front of the Brandenburg gate.

That was nice, but there were a lot of speeches and so on and I think the crowd was really more interested in the fireworks. That was fun.

What else? We went to an art opening in Kreuzberg. The advertisement said it was exploring the boundaries between natural and not natural, which I think this artist took to mean "natural and creepily unnatural". Yes, it is a dress made of bones:

There were a lot of other really great things there, like this papier-mache sculpture:

But some of it, I didn't really understand. I'm not sure anyone understood this piece, which seemed to consist simply of a pile of dirt. And before you criticize me for having two wines, one is Triffid's!

Speaking of art, there is a cafe in Prenzlauerberg that is sort of like the Missouri Lounge... but with giant fire sculptures in back! There is a welding studio there where artists work on their sculptures and you can go around and look at all their work between sipping a beer near the firepits in the yard. It's a lot of fun. Here are some pictures of the art, a little out of focus because the camera doesn't do too well in the dark. Looks a lot like Burning Man, huh?

Also, we had our first dinner party at our house! That was super fun. It was a potluck with all Triffid's friends from German class. They all brought stuff from their country. We had chinese dumplings, spanish tortilla, sangria, israeli cake, and moroccan chicken. It was delicious!

SO! what's new with you all?

it's out of controooool

Remember the tomato plant that had to be tied to a string from the upper balcony? Now it is almost touching the upper balcony. It's taking over! Here I am, worried.

fluores-scents

Too bad I don't have a picture at home... now my fluorescence experiment works! Remember how I was writing about the project, and I said that when a molecule absorbs energy, it would rather spit it out? And it does that by throwing off a photon? Well I collected the light using a camera and so we can tell exactly where the molecule was sitting in the 50 nanoseconds or so that it takes to emit. It's pretty accurate too--in that 50 ns time the molecule flies about the width of a hair.

Tomorrow we are getting a washing machine! This is very exciting. It's coming at 6:30. That leaves time for several loads before bed.

One last bit of news. At the moment there is a documentary about prostitutes on TV. We can't understand the words. That's probably good.

tomatens

Look at the enormous tomato that Triffid grew! It's almost 6 feet tall and it has about 20 green tomatoes on it. We have some mozzarella and basil in reserve for when they are all ripe and we have to eat caprese salads for a week solid.

The kitty says to tell you all, "purr."

It is starting to be fall here because we are at 52 degrees north. I had no idea we were so far north. That's like Edmonton Alberta! I am going out tomorrow to buy a coat.

I finally got a bike! I ride to work now when it doesn't rain. The train takes 30 minutes but if I try I can get there in 20 minutes with the bike. If I don't get lost. Then it's more like an hour. Here is a picture from when I was riding around the other day:

Berlin is full of cranes. There was tonnes (metric, of course) of money pouring in to the east after reunification. It still hasn't totally worked its way through. They are still building like crazy, and knocking down some old buildings. This is an old brewery that used to make beer in the city. Now the operation moved out of the city and the building is in the process of being turned into condos.

rolls

Sometimes things I see in English make me laugh out loud. I think that perhaps the Germans don't fully understand America. But they sure think we're cool. The other day I was buying socks and there were some on the rack with the English word "JEANS" knitted in. They were cool because they were English. Next to those, there was another pair with the words "DENIM CLUP." Not denim club, mind you, but denim clup.

Here is another example of someone's slightly warped understanding of America. I will make it extra big so you can appreciate all the details:

First off, they are buns. And who in America puts big fat slices of cucumber on their hot dog? Triffid said when she saw these in the store she knew she had to have them. We are going to bring them to our post softball game grill party tomorrow.

what does it mean?

Today there was a double rainbow over the chemistry building. Here is a picture of it reflecting in the windows.

grunewald

The Grunewald is enormous! It is a forest on the edge of Berlin with lots of really tall trees and hardly any undergrowth. I think this is the way with forests here, not like in Oregon where there is so much undergrowth that you get stuck trying to just walk through.

Lots of neat things live in the forest. There are woodpeckers, deer, and wild boars! We saw some boars when we were out hiking hte other day but Triffid was too slow with the camera. There was a dad, mom, and a baby. Actually it was probably a teenager in boar years. It was all walking behind, not wanting to be seen with its embarrassing parents.

There were also tons of mushrooms. We were on the lookout for morels or pfifferlinge, but we didn't find any. Too bad. Pfifferlinge are the local mushroom specialty. Every cafe advertises them on their daily menus and we wanted some on the cheap.

pflanzen

There are some really great plants here. Like this one:

This is asiatic poke weed. It is extremely poisonous. And, it's growing on the sidewalk next to a little coffee shop in our neighborhood. There are nice things you can do with it though, like make purple dye. We haven't tried that though.

There is also this vine in our street:

I bet you know this one! There are lots of blossoms. It's too bad we didn't bring our brewing equipment with us. There are also linden trees, which I think are maybe the nicest trees ever. They have dark green leaves with silver undersides and pretty yellow flowers. I didn't take this picture:

I was talking about them with Gabriele, the Italian postdoc in my lab, and he said if you want green leaves with silver undersides you should plant olives. I admit they are tastier than linden.

so much stuff

Wow! So much happened to us this week. Last weekend we went to a mexican restaurant. That was a strange experience, not anything like Mexican food in California. There was a very German flavor about all the food. No sausage, but definitely olive oil, herbs I never tasted in mexican food before, and no chilis. That was a little sad.

Now we have two friends from Berkeley living in Berlin! Stefan came here before we did and is working at the Humboldt University, and Oleg just arrived to work at the Max Born Institute. It's a little America party in Berlin.

We also went to Miss UBahn. It was a lot of fun. There were ten contestants and they all had different clothes made by different designers. Here is a picture.

Everything was good design, but maybe they could have been better organized: "And now, Miss Rudesheimer Platz! Um. Instead, Miss... Alexander Platz!" The fuzziness was not limited to the MC:

We also went to the Berlin Beer Festival. There were so many beers! You buy a mug when you go in and then all the different stands fill it for you.

Then, when you are done, you sell the mug back and they wash it. It was pretty clever--there were no cups on the ground.

I also wrote a review article for Laser and Photonics Reviews... they wanted something about control of quantum systems using ultrashort laser pulses. I know about that! So Thomas and I put it together and we are about to submit it.

Today is hot and maybe we will go swimming. Right now though, I am going to drink some coffee.

thunderstorms!

Yesterday we had enormous thunderstorms. I got soaked walking 3 blocks from the softball field to the Ubahn station! We are having a "friendly" double header on Sunday, but our coach is a really intense german woman and I don't think friendly means quite the same thing in this league. Anyway, we managed to find a softball glove. Just one. It was on craigslist actually, and when we got it, it turned out that the person selling it used to play on our team. Small, small world.

Tomorrow we are going to Miss U-Bahn. That is an art exhibition modelled after a beauty pageant--each artist designs clothes for their models to wear. The clothes have to be based on U-bahn stations. I think it will be a good time.

less depressing

To make up for not posting during the week and also to make up for the last post, here is a kitty picture.

If you want to come see the kitty hanging over the stairs, you can get really cheap flight direct from Portland to Berlin on KLM. KLM is always nice to fly because they give out Heinekin.

die neue wache

Has it been an entire week? I am lazy.

Today we went to Mitte and walked around. We saw the TV tower, museum island, and the Humboldt University. There is also a war memorial called the Neue Wache. Actually there are a lot of memorials around Berlin, but this is the oldest... it was built originally as a guard house for the Prussian kings in the 1800s, then after WWI they made it a memorial to the German dead of that war. Then after WWII, the memorial was in east Berlin, and the Soviets remade it (ironically) as a memorial to the "victims of fascism and militarism." After reunification it was changed again and now it is a memorial to the victims of war, and of tyrranical government.

Seeing how the meaning of the monument had changed was strangely moving. It made it clear how important it is for us to be kind to our adversaries. Their memorial might also become our memorial in the future.

Here there is quite a reluctance to contemplate the Nazi times and the aftermath of the war. There seems to me to be a deep sense of shame and really a wish that silence will make the old wounds go away. Given America's experience with slavery, I wonder whether that is a good idea. There is a resurgence of Nazi ideology in Germany as well as in America. People are very afraid that the historical remains of the war in Germany can become shrines for the neo-Nazis. How do you stop such a terrible thing from taking over? I don't know.

We got some new furniture yesterday. It is all inspected and kitty-approved.

We originally went to buy a dresser off craigslist, but when we arrived at the apartment, the girl said, "I'm moving and I don't want to take all this with me. Here, would you like a bed frame? How about a mirror? How about... " and we came away with a full truck load.

In Berlin there is a thing called "möbeltaxi" which is a taxi service with moving vans instead of cars. When you have a load, you call and they will come pick you up in about 15 minutes. Then you load your stuff, pay them 40 euros, and they take you anywhere in the city.

Now we have a guest bed, so you can come to visit us.

Botanischer Garten!

M was quite popular, 

especially with the coots.

The plants were fantastic, of course:

the cinquecento

Here is the smallest and cutest car ever manufactured. It is the Fiat 500 (or, if you are italian, cinquecento). In principle it has four seats, but the front seats are so close together that you can only fit two if they are touching, and the back ones only have legroom for a barbie doll. Also, it appears to be made out of aluminum cans and it probably has a go-kart engine. But look, it's a convertible!

Life with no car is super easy in Berlin. You can walk from one subway stop to the next in ten minutes so anywhere is five minutes or less from transit. And even though you're not supposed to, people bring all kinds of ridiculous stuff with them on the subway. Furniture, building materials, exotic animals... I saw an entire band of musicians, with drum kit, performing on a train!

suuuper creepy

Perhaps the creepiest thing I have seen in Germany. Perhaps, dare I say it, one of the creepiest things I have ever seen? It ranks high in any case.

This is in front of a Greek restaurant near our house. It seems Germans think Greeks are waiting to touch you inappropriately when you turn your back. Or maybe there is a Greek owner, and he thinks this is what his German clientelle wants to see?

He's watching you.

schwimmen

Today we went swimming after work. Actually it was our 4th time swimming in 6 days. It's so hot! We went to Krumme Lanke, which apparently is where all the naked people go. That was fine; it's nice that you don't need to hike around looking for a changing room. Here is a picture of the lake that someone posted on the internet (we forgot our camera).

You have to be a crazy person to be comfortable right now. The lady at the bank said that people were coming in on their days off so that they could sit in the air conditioning. And I have never seen so many adults eating popsicles.

We played beach volleyball yesterday! That was super fun. There is a place in Prenzlauerberg called BeachMitte. It's a tiki bar surrounded by about 50 sand volleyball courts. How many dumptruck loads of sand they had to move, I don't know. Anyway, it's like a pool hall, you just pay for your hour or two and they give you a ball. There were some Americans setting up a game for expats over the internet, so we went. They were really nice and we will probably play again next week.

Next to the volleyball courts they have the raddest parkour course I have ever seen:

In America this is one giant lawsuit (or lots of small lawsuits?) waiting to happen. But in Germany? Maybe they can get away with having no safety of any kind. Or maybe before you go up they give you a parachute.

Here is a commercial that is playing on German TV right now. I feel the reciprocal

way about my German.

More on the world cup later. Maybe.

4th of July!

Happy belated 4th of July!

M and I looked online for a group of Americans to celebrate with and found some people were hosting "Amerika Camp" and there would be games and costumes.  We went, all excited to meet some people, and it was...not like we'd imagined.  Even though people there were our age, they somehow made us feel 100.  Then another scientist, and his scientist wife, and her German parents, showed up and we hung out with them.  They were super nice and we had an awesome time.  They had also come for the games, which never happened, but we ate a lot of meat and were introduced to the Zuckermelone (Santa Claus melon), which is one of the best 3 melons I've ever tasted.  I bought one the next day at the Turkish market.

On our way home, we found that some things don't need translating:

I hope that you all had a great 4th as well, and if you have any pictures of fireworks, send them my way. It was very sad not to see any.

renting an apartment in germany

So, I'm not at all clear on what the longest word in the world actually means! Mieten is to rent, but that's all I can figure out. That is a little like what it was like to actually rent an apartment here... even though our landlords speak english, and I know a little german, there are a lot of special german words and special english words that defy translation. So we all just did a lot of smiling and nodding and laughing at each other and ourselves and then we signed some papers. Really that's all I know.

my work

Some people have been asking about my job. I think this is flattering but maybe they don't know how long I can talk about it. I will try to keep it short and not go on tangents.

Here is my machine.

It looks like my old machine but smaller. In some ways it is a lot more sophisticated, mostly because I didn't build it! It's a vacuum chamber with a jet source on one end. The source is called a jet because when molecules spray out, they get accelerated to supersonic speed.

The middle of the chamber has this glass chip in it. The chip has electrodes all along it in a little stripe pattern. When we put a charge on the electrodes, little traps form for the molecules. Molecules get stuck hovering 20 microns above the chip and sit there.

What we want to do is image the molecules one by one using a camera. This sounds impossible, but it's really quite simple--at least in principle! The way we plan to do it is to use a laser to make the molecules absorb energy. The molecule would rather give up that energy, so it spits the light back out. We just wait until after the laser fires, then turn on our camera!

So why do it? My boss says, "I don't know what it's good for, but it's fun." But I think there is a lot of potential for this kind of work. You never know when something will come in handy. When the guys built the first laser in the 60s everyone thought is was nice, but a little unnecessary. A curiosity. Now you can use it to get your eye fixed or that ugly tattoo removed.

I think trapped molecules on a chip can make a quantum-mechanical computer, or measure whether the fundamental constants of the universe change with time, or help people understand general relativity. We are just laying the groundwork now, figuring out the more mundane stuff before people can make the really exciting things work. That's what I hope anyway. We will see.

But in the meanwhile the whole thing is a bit of a kludge. See what I mean? These are how we make a magnetic field:

Bike wheels! They are wrapped in wire. When charged particles go in a circle, they make a magnetic field that points out of the circle's plane. Instead of a bike wheel, imagine a clock. When a positive charge goes clockwise the field points into the clock face. Why not out of the clock? This is one of the mysteries of nature.

Speaking of mysteries of nature, did you know that no one has ever found a magnetic monopole? On the surface this seems like a tedious thing to bring up, but I think it's fascinating. Here's why.

Electric charges moving in a circle make magnetic fields. These fields always have crazy shapes. The simplest shape anyone has ever seen is a dipole, like the field of the bike wheel. It points out of the clock face if you sit in the middle of the ring, but it reverses direction when you go outside the ring. Why no monopole fields? These are fields that point outward from the center, like a pincushion. Electricity has monopoles. Gravity has monopoles. Even nuclear forces have monopoles. Only magnetism doesn't.

But, it gets weirder.

It turns out that only one magnetic monopole, anywhere in the universe, forces all the electric charges to come in neat little integer bundles. Turns out they do come in integer bundles--multiples of e, the electron's charge. And that totally strange, totally implausible fact about electricity is exactly what experiments tell us. So, is there one magnetic monopole somewhere out there, quietly quantizing all our electric charges? No one knows. I hope there is. I hope it's in our house.