Snow

It was snowing in Berlin all day yesterday, though it really doesn’t seem to snow here like it does in Boston. At the end of a day like that in Boston, we’d have 8 or 9 inches at least. Here, we were left with maybe an inch or two of accumulation, though one of my students who comes from a small town a good way east of Berlin, in the Brandenburg countryside, said they had 40 cm (about 16 inches!) this morning. Here’s a picture from earlier in the year of the schoolyard in snow.

Anyway what I find interesting about snow here is that there doesn’t seem to be any sort of system for dealing with it, though it’s not exactly unexpected. The plan for handling snow seems to be an offshoot of the Bush plan for dealing with global warming: ignore it, and sooner or later it will go away. This extends to streets, sidewalks, anywhere snow might accumulate and be in the way. People walk on it, drive on it, ride their bikes on it, all the normal stuff except the obvious SHOVELING it and PLOWING it.

I’m being somewhat unfair here by not mentioning that many of the streets are paved with cobblestones, and clearly plowing would tear them up. The sidewalks, too, are paved either with granite slabs (about as slippery as anything I can imagine, even when they’re just wet, let alone snowy) or with hundreds of smallish (5 cm) squarish cobbles. Both streets and sidewalks are very attractive, but plowing and shoveling wouldn’t be very practical.

So, instead of getting cleared off, the snow gets packed down into a solid, frozen, slippery crust. The students at school enjoy this crust and (with a little instigation from me, I admit) took to taking a good running start across the playground to seeing how far they could slide. On the other hand, it made the soccer court somewhat more of an adventure than usual. One day two of the kids and I played a game at our local playground in which actual soccer skill was irrelevant, it was only about who could stop and then get going again in the right direction first.

Surprisingly, they don’t use salt here, either, nor sand. Instead they spread tiny bits of broken stone on the sidewalks (see picture), which have a lovely habit of working their way into the soles of your shoes so as to scratch up the nice parquet floors. Perhaps there is some agreement between the flooring companies and the guys who work on the sidewalks; maybe it’s even the same guys but in different seasons. I expect this goes some way toward explaining why in most German households you take your shoes off when you come in; otherwise your floors get ruined and you have to have them refinished or go to IKEA to buy a cheap laminate flooring to put over it. Or a rug, but then you’d need a vacuum cleaner, too. Oy. (Side note: a nice little tradition here is to have a selection of guest slippers that visitors can wear. I like it!)

Berlinale

We've enjoyed the Berlin Film Festival, also known as the Berlinale. We didn't really get to the big name films, or even get to see the restored big screen epics like West Side Story and Ben Hur. But it's still been pretty interesting to see it going on and to be a part of it in some small way.

Each of us grownups has taken our class to see a set of short films, which is a fun thing to do with a group of students. My class went to see 6 short films, all of which were about young people, with topics ranging from bullies blowing things up to a boy disappearing in a cave opening onto the ocean (did he die? Don't know!) to the finale which involved a trio of girls taking turns pretending to do something they shouldn't in a closet with a spoon. Eewwww....but suffice it to say that this one too was about bullying and in the end the bullied girl spectacularly turned the tables on her tormentors. A little bit of the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally. The kids were really talking about that one! We'll have to hope for not too many parent emails about this trip!

Today we saw an interesting film from the Czech Republic, called Who's Afraid of the Wolf? It was billed as a romance you can take the kids to, but I didn't think it was so kid-friendly. A little girl sees her parents' relationship breaking up after the sudden arrival of her biological father (which she doesn't know anything about) and interprets her mother's weirdness as evidence that she's really an alien. A great reminder of the dangers of making off-hand comments to kids without thinking through how they might interpret it. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I weren't worried about what the kids were thinking.

Soccer (excuse me, Fußball) fans

We got on the train today to go wherever it was we were going--just how we get around now, what with no car--and it was jammed with people. Everyone seemed a bit surprised at the crowd, but a few people with blue-and-white scarves, or caps, clued us in that perhaps some of them were headed for Olympiastadion for today's soccer match. Hertha BSC, the local Bundesliga club (for those who don't know, that's like the German major league in soccer), is very good this year. Apparently they are perennial cellar-dwellers who suddenly find themselves atop the league standings.

Anyway we had to change trains at Friedrichstrasse. The train we were switching to was on the track opposite the one going to Olympiastadion, and this platform was even MORE crowded. Now everyone was wearing blue-and-white and it was a bit like Kenmore Square before a Red Sox game. The train pulled in, and we could tell before it stopped that it was full--but the doors opened and it turned out to be full of Bayern München fans! Not surprisingly, the BSC Hertha fans couldn't get in, and as the doors sat open we began to hear some Bayern songs. One brave (foolish?) soul even stuck a Bayern flag out the door and started waving it. The train was literally bouncing on the tracks as it pulled out of the station.

Fortunately everyone seemed pretty good natured about it. Probably with Red Sox-Yankee fans it wouldn't have gone so well.

Tropical Islands. In Germany.

For more photos of this adventure, check out our SmugMug gallery by clicking here

Wednesday, we went tropical. Or maybe we should say Tropical, as in Tropical Islands. Something of a cross between Club Med, an enclosed stadium, and your typical suburban mall, Tropical Islands boasts the world’s largest indoor rainforest and the highest water slide in Germany. It also has a “spa,” which translates into English as “naked sauna” and to Russian (I think) as something about “nudystlow,” or “place for the nudies.” Not surprisingly, TI also appears to have the world’s highest prices for a mall-quality burger and fries and the most-understaffed ice cream bar. Despite this particular annoyance we enjoyed ourselves quite a bit. And no fear of sunburn!

We found ourselves at TI thanks to a lovely (and much appreciated!) gift from some parents in my class. As we weren’t going anywhere in this dreary February vacation, and we had gift certificates that covered the entrance fee (which isn’t unreasonable), we decided to give it a shot. Sadly, the beach tents and hotel rooms were all fully booked for the whole month, so despite assurances from the folks on the phone that it would be OK if we just wanted to sleep on the beach, we decided to just go for the day.

Up and out early (for us), on the train by 9, arriving at TI via a shuttle bus ride through the abandoned air base where it’s situated (ah, capitalism!). Having fought our way through the crowds, we are assigned lockers, each of which is opened magnetically by a numbered wristband. This is genius. There is no need for money at TI (see the ClubMed bit here?) because all you need is your wristband. Just wave it at the register, or the entrance to the water slide, or whatever, and the cost is added to your bill. The problem, of course, is familiar to those from Boston—kind of a Charlie and the MTA issue. Whatever you spend, you have to pay to get out. We all wondered what would happen if you didn’t have the money.

Anyway, the first sign that things were different was the woman changing into her swimsuit right there next to me in the locker area. Not like the good ol’ USA where you could get arrested for something like that. We all managed to get changed (some of us in changing rooms, some not) and headed out to the beach.
The beach turned out to be about 5 yards wide, facing the “sea,” a giant 1.5-meter deep swimming pool faced on the other side by a giant blue wall painted to look like the sky. If you’re thinking “The Truman Show,” you’ve got it about right. People are packed into every available millimeter, and we had to shoehorn ourselves into a spot. It’s not really summer-hot in there, and it definitely isn’t sunny, but it was nice enough to go swimming. Lifeguards (and space) seemed to be in short supply, so there wasn’t much in the way of relaxing on the beach for the grownups.

After an overpriced lunch, we swam some more and then headed to the spa area to try to relax and warm up. Our children demonstrated their deep-set sheepiness and baa’ed their way after Mommy despite assurances that they didn’t HAVE to go to the spa. Well, anyway, it really was for the nudies. They even had an attendant come over to the whirlpool and tell those cowards who tried to sneak in with their suits (not us!) that they had to get out and take them off. We saw a lot of different comfort levels with this concept…some folks kept a towel wrapped around them while they stripped down, looking around nervously, some just couldn’t bring themselves to do it at all, and others just strolled about in their nothingness. It didn’t take long for the kids to recognize that although they were mostly OK with the naked thing (after all, we’re not so modest at our house), they didn’t really like sitting around in a REALLY hot room doing nothing. So it didn’t end up being all that relaxing as we kept having to get up and go back out. I never did try the room which was listed at 85-90° C (about 190 F) and 5% humidity. Now THAT’S hot.

We waited in an excruciatingly long line for excruciatingly mediocre ice cream, then split up for mini-golf and a trip to the lagoon, which turned out to be a lot of fun. Two water slides in the dark, a huge waterfall, kid-friendly depth, and warm water made it a great place to play. Should have come here first! Then we chose play time over another excruciatingly overpriced food experience and headed to the WATERSLIDES. No joke here. The red one was cool, big enough to ride with inner tubes. The yellow was high, lots of twists and turns, fast and much fun. The blue slide…a different kettle of fish all together. Straight. High. Steep. Very narrow and closed, so you can’t sit up. Once you’re in, there’s just about time to say “Oh my God, this is too stee—“ before you’re whipping around the corner, water shooting up your nose, and into the tank at the bottom. Worth doing once; maybe the second time, when you know what it is, it’s more fun, but none of us were interested after one trip down.

By the time we finished on the slides it was 7:00 and we were running out of steam. We watched a bit of the “show,” (clearly still in the rehearsal stages, though there were some cool acrobatics) then packed up and headed out. Stood in the changing area with daughter no. 1 in full winter dress while a woman at the other end walked about in her bikini. Strange juxtaposition. Missed the shuttle bus we wanted, and had to wait 45 minutes for the next one.

The bus was late. We knew the train wouldn’t be (it IS Germany, after all). The driver seemed in no hurry…stopping to chat with his pals, taking his time, casually meandering through the parking lot…it wasn’t ONLY us uptight Americans who wanted to grab and shake him. The next train, after all, wasn’t leaving for TWO HOURS. After 15 agonizing minutes of cruising back down the deserted taxiways, past abandoned hangars, and out onto the local roads, we arrived in time to send the bus full of people sprinting through the tunnel to the Berlin side of the tracks. We all made it with at least two minutes to spare…and so, home.