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.