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.

Here is a picture of us in Munich. Munich is neither Paris nor Berlin. But it's a nice picture.

virtues of paris

Here is where I will talk about the virtues of Paris over Berlin and, at times, why I secretly prefer Berlin.

An Initial Report

Annie is teaching in Paris; I am researching in Berlin. We are buying lots of EasyJet tickets.