Annie enjoys surprises. On a recent visit I decided that I’d surprise her with a visit to the Badeschiff—a river barge that has been converted into a swimming pool floating in the icy waters of the Spree.

Because it is winter, the proprietors of the Badeschiff have converted it into something more resembling a spa than a swimming pool. The various docks and the floating barge/pool itself have been covered with a modernist plywood and plastic sheeting structure that serves to keep the heat in. There are recliners and magazines, a bar with drinks and hors d’oeuvres, big fluffy towels and bathrobes, a masseuse, and two saunas that are kept so breathtakingly hot that Annie and I could not quite manage the fifteen minutes till the scheduled steaming (every hour on the hour).

The pool is probably (necessarily) heated, but was still shockingly cold (especially after the sauna). On either end, it is possible to swim out from under the afore-mentioned modernist plywood/plastic enclosure and into the open air, from which vantage you can gaze curiously at the chunks of ice floating by, and at the ducks on said ice chunks staring intently back at you with an envious longing twinkling in their beady little ducky eyes.

The saunas and the lounge chairs seemed to be the most popular accoutrements.

And this brings me to an interesting point, a cultural difference that I knew about in the abstract, but some how contrived not to think about when planning the surprise: everyone was nekkid. This included Annie and me after the first swim ‘cause, well, swim suits just seemed silly under the circumstances.

Thus it was that I myself was surprised by my surprise.

After the initial shock it was fairly nice. And there were the fluffy towels and bathrobes when everyone was not actually swimming or in the sauna. Which is good, since there are really very few people I want to see naked. And even fewer who I want to see me naked.

I think Annie enjoyed the sauna and the deck chairs more than the pool. She was quite a wimp about the pool, actually, and I only managed to coax her into the water once after the sauna. One of my enduring memories—one of the ones that will be sure to flit through my brain as my life flashes before my eyes on my deathbed (or as that bus bears down on me)—will be of Annie clinging to that ladder, bare-ass naked, one foot in the water, covered in chicken skin, as a couple of German men bobbing in the pool below her shout words of encouragement.

There were kinder and gentler ways of cooling down after the sauna.

And so we found ourselves enjoying the odd experience of standing on a little patio at 10 o’clock at night with our fellow over-heated sauna-goers, steaming gently in the winter air and exposing ourselves to the incredulous scrutiny of the ducks—who were probably wondering why we didn’t go back inside, or grow some feathers, or just go home already so that they could try to sneak into the pool.

After four or five visits with nary a ticket controller in sight, Annie’s 7-day pass was checked three times on this last trip. That would have been 120 Euro!

I myself have been checked often enough to convince me that schwarzfahren can’t really pay in the long term: had I not had my Semesterkarte (and had I been the sort of person who could blithely ignore the possibility of ticket controls without succumbing to stomach ulcers) I would have paid about 100 Euro more in fines by this point than my Semesterkarte cost me.

I’m sitting in Starbucks on Friedrichsstraße, trying to get over a killer headache.

I’m watching business love blossom in front of me. A young blond woman in a brown pinstriped business suit is leaning in to listen to an equally young fellow (a brunette, he) in a grey pinstriped business suit. Pinstripes seem popular this season.

She strokes his hand and says something—I’m too far away to hear what exactly.

The couple to the table to my left are less lovey, but enunciate more clearly. I haven’t been following the conversation too attentively, but things don’t seem to be going all that well at work—politics politics. He complains about somebody who got put on his work group just so someone else could have one of his people there—didn’t care whether the guy was actually qualified or not. “Ganz Machiavelli-mässig.”

Meanwhile, how did I end up at Starbucks again? I tried to stay away, the staff often irritates me by trying to speak English at me. But my headache was clearly demanding good strong coffee. Oh Starbucks, I just can’t quit you.

Oh ho! We’ve got some hot business kisses happening now! Right here in Friedrichsstraße, Ladies and Gentlemen. (Usually I’d expect this sort of thing in Paris, not Berlin). And now the coffee break is over—time to get back to work.

Bomb in Berlin

A couple of days ago I was working in the Staatsbibliothek, in the Unter den Linden branch.

(I've started to get my books delivered there instead of to the larger and (as I've found) easier-to-get-a-table-at Haus Potsdamer Straße, which takes somewhat longer to get to on public transportation.)

At 3:30 p.m. a woman walked into the reading room and said: "Liebe Leser und Leserinnen!" (I love how they call us "readers" rather than "ladies and gentlemen") "We've been informed that construction workers have just found a bomb in the street in front of the house. It is a bomb from the Second World War. We've been asked to evacuate the building within thirty minutes: please stop your work and make your way to the exit."

Well, this was different.

I made my way with the others to the exit, where the usual controls of library cards and personal possessions in clear plastic baggies proceeded with perhaps a bit less rigour than usual, got my coat and bag from my locker and wandered out onto the street. There I found myself behind police tape.

There was only the one block roped off, and I walked east, past the police officer, past Humboldt Universität to the Christmas Markt in front of the Palast der Republik.

When I made my way back to Unter den Linden at around 6:45 I found much, much more roped off. It was impossible to get to Humboldt, where I was expecting to attend a talk, It was also very difficult to get north, to the Friedrichstraße station, with almost all of Unter den Linden blocked off. The traffic was having a horrible, miserable time of it--nobody having expected to have to do without this street come rush hour time,...

Later I found out that it was a 500 Kilogram British Bomb that had been hiding 3 meters underground all these years--right behind the equestrian statue of Friedrich the Great.

When I studied in Spain in 1991 I took a class called the Moors in Spain or something of the sort. This 400-level course was hardly appropriate for my 200-level Spanish, but I was genuinely interested in the topic. However, because of my weak Spanish, I spent much of the semester lost, so lost I couldn’t even read the first page of 200-page book we were assigned, so lost I couldn’t even find the classroom to take the midterm. But determined, I pleaded with the professor to let me take the midterm. I should have just saved my time and his, because I got a 7.5% (not seventy five percent, but a seven point five percent) on my test, a .75/10. Needless to say, I was devastated, shocked, embarrassed and somewhat amused, I had never done so poorly on any exam, nor had I known anybody who had received such a bad grade until today.

The last few weeks we have been giving midterms. While most students get a moyen 10-12/20, a few do significantly worse. In fact, one student got a 1/20, in other words, a 5%. My title has been stripped.

Zu Risiken und Nebenwirkungen

Zu Risiken und Nebenwirkungen:
fragen Sie Ihren Arzt oder Apotheker?

Zu Risiken
(UND Nebenwirkungen)
fragen Sie Ihren Arzt
(ODER Apotheker)?!

Zu Risiken und Nebenwirkungen fragen Sie?
--Ihren Arzt oder Apotheker!

Zu Risiken und
Nebenwirkungen fragen
Sie Ihren Arzt o--

Italech or Frenlian

In my French class there are four Italians, a Portuguese and me. For the first couple of weeks, we were all doing quiet well. Perhaps because we spent most of the time mastering, “My name is Annie, I am American, I am a student,” in French, of course. This week, however, classes got decisively harder. Suddenly we were talking about what the people from our country were like. When the teacher asked Amanda from Milan, the first thing she clarified for our saintly teacher is that, “In Italy, people are different depending on where they are from, the north, the center, or the south.” As she said that she was looking around both in trepidation and affirmation. But Carlo, the medical student from Naples sitting to my left was too lost to understand or maybe he was too busy secretly text messaging a hit out on her from his cell phone to respond. It was clear, though, that we all arrived at our linguistic ceilings with this exercise. The Italians’ bad French slid into a mix of French and Italian that left our teacher stymied. The rest of us, however, could understand perfectly this new freakish hybrid language since Italian and Portuguese aren’t too far apart and Spanish is like Italian’s younger sister in terms of languages. By the time the last Italian was asked, I think more Italian in a bad French accent was spoken than anything else. One of the Italian students would say something and the rest of us would nod in agreement, while the poor teacher seemed stuck, so she just gave us our homewokr and sent us home. As we walked out we all lamented how we were going to end up speaking a language that only the 5 of us could understand.