Naomi's birthday

Today Naomi turned... a day older than yesterday, but in a birthday sort of way. It was a nice day.

We went out to the 'Carnival of Cultures' that was happening in Kreuzberg, along with 700,000 other people (according to the TV in the subway). It was cool, and crowded. So crowded, in fact, that:


('No Place for Nazis')

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Before dinner, we got birthday cocktails at an Indian restaurant.

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And, coming home, the light was amazing - a sunset on one side, and a dark storm on the other. Not a bad metaphor for Berlin. Here's the sunny side:

Marx, Pickles, Soccer, Kant

We live near the famous 'Karl Marx Allee,' supposedly one of the best examples of Socialist Realist architecture (at this point they just look sort of old, and unkept, which is interesting compared to other parts of the city which look brand new even if they are older). And.... here it is:

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We decided we do not like German pickles. Sadly. Senfgurken (the big yellowish things) should be 'mustard pickles,' but we're not sure quite what they are. Any ideas?

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We stumbled upon some sort of soccer event (or as they call it here, 'NFL' event). People were wearing green, others were wearing red, and all of them seemed to be yelling. And drunk. It wasn't clear whether the game had happened already or not, or where it was taking place. But there was a cool church:

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And Colin really liked this street. Probably because of the pavement.

Fernsehturm

A couple days ago, with Mom (Colin's Mom), we went up the TV tower. It was pretty impressive. There's a restaurant on top that rotates 360 degrees every half hour. A little nauseating, but worth it. It is also an impressive piece of 1969, East German architecture (i.e. ugly):


"Who Let the Dogs Out?" -- good question... but who is asking? And why do they need to broadcast it to space?



The tower from a distance:

A couple pictures (more on the way)

Some of the things we've been up to.

zusammen (nicht getrennt)

(i.e. together - not separate)-- This is the beginning of the joint blog:
(Naomi): Yes, I happily made it without problems! So far, we've walked around a bit (yesterday and today were a bit rainy, though), seen some of the city and done a bunch of people watching and eating. For instance, tonight for dessert we had karmalisiert spargel (caramelized asparagus, with strawberries) -- much more delicious than it might sound, in fact. I also got to try something else that sounds un-tasty -- the famous licorice ice cream. I just had a taste, but it was much less gross than i imagined (although not something i would eat regularly), and oddly tasted somewhat like coffee...

Some first observations: It is very weird to see people walking around with beer bottles on the street, at all times of day, very normally. In NY that's something you'd get arrested for, but here it is sanctioned! crazy! (I'm still curious what kind of social effect public drinking has -- so far it doesn't seem like much, except for a woman on the train missing her stop, which she didn't end up being that upset about).

Also, the city is interesting and different from a lot of other European cities I've been to in that the buildings are mostly new (i.e. post-1950-ish, I'm guessing), at least so far, I haven't seen really any "old" buildings. At the same time, they are also very colorful which just makes the city seem fresher and more youthful than, for instance someplace like NYC, even though every surface is highly graffitied...

(Colin) I don't have much to add, because I'm very full of asparagus (we also had some asparagus cream soup - tasty). Naomi got to see the old apartment today, and watch as the last piece of furniture left. I feel validated by her not thinking the lakritz ice-cream was completely disgusting.

Naomi made it here...

without much drama. Her bag didn't make a connection, but the Lufthansa people delivered it to our apartment last night.

The next post will be from both of us.

Completely done moving. Sort of.

Made it. Moving's a lot easier when you don't have much to move... but I'm still exhausted (erschöpft). The first load of stuff I brought over last night in a taxi, and the rest came in three trips on the bike with a fully-loaded backpack. It would have been much less pleasant without the backpack - it's a sort of medium-largish bag that Naomi lent me for the trip, and today it's my friend. From the right angle, the top looks like a frog:



And here is my trustworthy steed, barely visible in the courtyard through the apartment window.



There are still a couple things I need to take care of at the old apartment, but that can wait a bit. I'll be back there Friday meeting some of Amy's friends who are picking up furniture. And Naomi will be here then (at last!), so I can show her my old neighborhood.

And... this might become a two-person blog soon.

Getting ready to move

I'll only stay one might night here in Kreuzberg, and then I'll be moving over the new place in Friedrichshain. So I've been trying to finish up a lot of the food that's lying around. Last night I made a curry-ish thing with a box of frozen spinach, some potatoes, onion, mushrooms, a tomato and some cabbage. It looked gross, but was pretty tasty (which is good, since I'll be eating it again tonight, and possibly tomorrow night too). Shown here with my phone (Amy gave me hers for the next couple months), and my dinner's entertainment:





And here's the building's elevator, which I think I'll sort of miss. If you look closely, you'll notice that 'Rob' must have spent a lot of time in here.

The point of conversations where people just take turns rambling

I'm reading a book now (Gibbard's "Wise Choices, Apt Feelings"), which spends some time talking about what the point of conversation is. His focus is on how language lets us coordinate emotions and actions, where this helps us get along - e.g. you and I will get along much better if I tend to feel guilt when you feel resentful towards me than if I never do.

One thing that the book hasn't discussed (so far), though, is how little people listen to each other in an average conversation. Just from my experience of causally eavesdropping on people, it seems that a whole lot of conversations just involve people taking turns talking, and paying only minimal attention to what the other person's saying.

So what's the (evolutionary) point of such conversations? Here's one guess: we humans walk around with a very complicated set of beliefs about the world, and we do a lot of complicated processing of those beliefs and what we experience. Add to that that we're neurotic, paranoid, and insecure. Because of that, we're dangerously likely to go crazy on our own, and start forming dangerously false beliefs ("nobody likes me," "everyone's out to get me," "I think I've cursed myself," etc.). A good check against that, though, would be to occasionally run our world-view by another person. Moreover, given how complicated our world-representations are, what's best is to be able to communicate lots of that representation at once. And this is what happens in take-turns-talking conversations: people talk and talk, and only really respond to the other person if s/he has said something obviously crazy.

(I think this is something I've mentioned before to a couple people, so sorry for the repeat.)

Also - is the cover illustration of Gibbard's book supposed to be broad brush strokes? That would be funny. If not, I'd like to call dibs.

Goodbye, Amy and Audrey!

My roommates left this morning, heading back to the US. When I originally started looking for apartments in Berlin, I was thinking that I would get my own place for the couple months before Naomi got here. In retrospect, that would have been a terrible idea - I think the homesickness would have eaten me up. Sharing an apartment with a German would have been interesting, and good for working on the language, but I think that starting off here was made much, much nicer by having a fellow American to show me around, and a super-cute baby for constant entertainment. I'm really glad I got to know them. They're both lovely, and I hope our paths cross again someday.

Here they both are at a cafe yesterday:




And here's the apartment living room, with just a couple things that various people will come take over the next few days. So I suddenly have a lot of space to myself... I'm not really the dance party type, but, as they say, when life throws you lemons, sugar, a juicer, an empty lemonade keg, a pre-made lemonade stand, and a note saying "make lemonade!", you should make lemonade.

A couple pictures from the new apartment...

So, through the magic of craigslist, Naomi and I found a Berlin couple to do an apartment swap with. I just met them today (Laura and Julian). They were nice, and the vibe from them was really good. The apartment is a little further out from the center of the city, but the neighborhood seems very nice, and we're close to some very convenient S-Bahn and U-Bahn stations.

Here are a couple pictures of the apartment, which I'll move into on Tuesday. It's huge.




So yeah, we'll have a little courtyard balcony. There's also a rooftop terrace where people seem to do grilling.

And here's the funny part: they told me that this a 'low-income' building. It's beautiful and clean and recently renovated. And there doesn't seem to be any stigma about living in a low-income building. These Germans are so crazy...

I didn't get a picture, but just imagine sandy-orange ice cream

And the flavor was 'sanddorn,' which Leo.org told me means 'sea-buckthorn' (or 'sandthorn' or 'seaberry'). That didn't help much, but Wikipedia tells me its a shrub native to Eurasia that produces berries that are rich in Vitamin C. It also tells me that "seabuckthorn based juice is even popular in Germany and Scandinavian countries," which I suppose is why they'd make an ice cream out of it.

But it was sort of gross. Kind of like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth. I miss licorice.

I'll have another 'about Germany' post soon, I promise

Careful stalkers will note that I already wrote something like this on Facebook, but since it's still on my mind:

Once of my conversation partners gave me an article about Thomas Pogge, a member of the Yale philosophy department who has recently doing some high-profile work about the obligation of wealthier nations to help poor populations. Apparently, he has a project that aims to get drug companies to lower the costs of their products (and so make drugs available to poorer nations) in exchange for some special compensation from nations like the US. The idea would be that we comparably wealthy people keep paying what we're paying, and the drug companies maintain a healthy profit... so this doesn't require that evil 'socialist medicine' that John McCain and others are sworn to fight.

So then I was thinking about the average American, and how he ('he', because men are more average than women) might be talked into financially supporting the health of less wealthy populations. Here's the thought: about the only thing that really gets people going in the US is fear. World-wide epidemics are freakin' scary. One of the best ways to lower the odds of a world-wide epidemic would be to have better world-wide health. Would something like this work as an advertising campaign for organizations like Partners in Health? Is anyone already doing it?

I'm going to go eat a banana now and read some Allan Gibbard, I think.

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UPDATE

Turns out the Sen. Kennedy is making something close to this argument (though only in national terms, unfortunately). From the NY Times:
“Everyone is at risk,” he said in a statement, “when the people who serve our food, clean our offices and care for our elderly can’t take time off and get well.”

Beautiful morning

It really is. Sunny, with some gentle poofy clouds drifting along. A little cool, but warm in the sun. Birds are singing and the trees are swaying in the breeze.

On that positive note...

I've been really surprised at how, well, stupid my limited German makes me feel. I know full well that that's irrational, that my lack of language skills come out of lack of time spent working on the language, but I still get this really clear feeling of being an idiot when I can't make out what's going on. (Yesterday was especially rough - the colloquium paper was on Hegel, who I can't make sense of even in English, and so I couldn't even guess the thread of the conversation.)

It's a useful experience to have, though, because I think I now have a slightly (very slightly) better idea of what it's like being an immigrant. The popular US stereotype of Mexican immigrants being lazy often seems to be strengthened by the way that the immigrants tend to stay in separate communities and don't learn English. But this feeling of being stupid fuels both of those: feeling stupid sucks, so it makes me want to hang out with other English-speakers, and it makes it much, much harder to find the motivation to learn the language. And that's true for me even though I'm living a life of (relative) luxury, without having to have a real job.

Spargel

Berliners are crazy about asparagus. I went to a restaurant yesterday with a conversation partner, and they had a special asparagus menu... and this was a place whose main thing seemed to be steak.

And the best possible way to celebrate asparagus season?



Yes, it's what you think it is, together with a scoop of hazelnut. It was pretty good, actually, though I don't think I'll make a habit of it.

A ramble about yet another topic I don't know anything about

One thing that's come up often in talking with conversation partners is the contrast between German and American social services. If you're unemployed here, and a citizen, you will have health care and enough money to live on. Some of the Germans (not the unemployed ones) seem to have a slightly negative view of this, for the same reason that traditional US conservatives would: roughly, that it allows people to be lazy.

The main response I've found coming out of my mouth about this is something like this (translated from insultingly bad German to English): pretty much any government/social services system we opt for is either going to err on the side of allowing people to be lazy, or on the side of letting disadvantaged people suffer (including people who want to be productive but who are stuck is bad situations). Both of these aren't things we want, but if we look at it like a choice, then we should decide on the basis of which is worse. And that looks like a pretty easy call - obviously, it's worse to have disadvantaged people suffering.

The point of this is that the arguments I've heard (mainly in the US) against a social-services-rich governmental approach is that it leads to something bad (allowing people to be lazy). But the fact that something has a bad result only entails that we shouldn't do it if the alternative wouldn't be worse.

In other news: I'm worried that I'm going to have to stop running for a few weeks. My hip just isn't feeling quite right.

Things are moving along here. Amy and Audrey move out in about a week, and Naomi gets here in less than two. In a month, I'll give the first of three philosophy presentations here. And in a little more than 2.5 months, I'll be back in New York.

I feel like my German has been making regress recently. Either that, or I'm just becoming more acutely aware of how very far I have to go till I'm where I want to be.

A question: is the notion of 'repentance' necessarily theological? Could someone honestly and literally claim to repent if he/she had no belief in the supernatural?

Here are some special words that I'll all probably misuse in embarrassing ways before long:

• eventuell - possible


• das Gift - the poison


• prägnant - pithy

More food

This is a new type of sauce/spread from the Turkish shop down the street, called Acuka (the internet tells me it's also called Muhammara). It's made mainly from tomatoes, peppers, walnuts and garlic. Very, very tasty. (I think I've burned out on Ajvar for a while - I went through that jar pretty quickly.)

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And this is the latest bread I'm trying. It's triangular, and filled with seeds. I like it, though the triangle thing isn't great for sandwiches. But it's great for, say, eating acuka (or, for dessert, Nutella).

What's the shortest English sentence that, when in quotes, gets no results on Google?

So far, my best is "Arcs burp."

Looks like today is cool and rainy. I may make a point of not doing anything productive today.

So, I'm now "that American guy who comes to a German philosophy seminar in Germany where everyone else is speaking German and asks his questions in English." Oh well. But it was either that, asking stumbling, unintelligible questions in embarrassing German, or just sitting quietly. I may yet ask a stumbling, unintelligible question in embarrassing German, but I realized that 5 years of being in grad school has made me unable to just sit quietly when philosophy's being discussed.

On a different note: I had a new thought about religious commandments that don't have a direct moral justification. The starting thought is that it's better for the world if there is cultural diversity. A single culture can get swept along in morally bad trends, people are more creative when they're surrounded by different viewpoints, etc. But the things that make for cultural diversity (1) shouldn't in any way imply that any culture is inferior or superior and (2) shouldn't in any way imply that we have different fundamental moral obligations. If that's right, then the things that distinguish cultures should be, from a neutral perspective, transparently arbitrary, so that a member of a given culture can honestly say, "we don't do X, but there's nothing wrong with you doing X." And so then a given culture should make some specific effort towards preserving those morally permissible but non-obligatory rules.

Why wasn't I warned about this?

They mix beer with Sprite or Fanta here, and call it 'Radler' or 'Alster'. So far, I've only seen it done with beers that are very light anyway (like Berliner Kindl), so the result tastes like a watery soft drink the color of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

After unexpectedly ordering a half-liter one of these a couple weeks ago, and not being into it, I've realized that I guess it has a place once in a while. I guess.

Berlin Jewish Museum

The New York Times has a fairly negative review of the Jewish Museum here.

I think it's too harsh - some of the criticisms are fair enough, but others are too much of the form "this isn't X, and X would be great, so this is bad." And I'm also not on board with the author's view that the larger Holocaust Memorial (near the American Embassy) is more effective. The Memorial seemed to me to be both too transparent in its symbolism (suggesting a graveyard), but also too easy to mentally skim over. It's composed of giant blocks, and while the idea is that you should walk between then, it's too easy to think of getting on top of them and hopping around (which I saw plenty of people doing). And that destroys any sense of gravity. So I thought, anyway.

The Museum, by contrast, has two abstract memorials, and both really struck me. I'll probably go back with Naomi and my mom when they're here later this month.

Quiet riot

As planned, I stayed home last night to avoid the riots. But nothing really happened on our street. There was some sort of demonstration down the street at Lausitzer Platz, next to the covered-window bank:

But people seemed to mostly just stand around. They chanted a bit, and waved some communist flags.

And some police were hanging out at the intersection:


But things were more lively elsewhere, the news tells me. Deeper into Kreuzberg, there was some stone-throwing, and Friedrichshain (the neighborhood to the east) had a more violent protest, where a bunch of policemen were injured (though apparently fewer than normal). And supposedly there was a huge protest over by Brandenburg Gate, but that's a fair ways away.

In other news: I've been here a month, now. I feel a little settled in, but still a little lost. Part of the reason, I think, is that I don't feel like I'm socially invested here at all - I know various people here, but if I ran back to NY tomorrow, I wouldn't feel like I'd really let anyone down (maybe myself, in a way, but that's different). So that's my thought for the morning.

Some words:

• anknüpfen - to tie in with, to begin (I'm still having some trouble getting an intuitive sense of this one)


• monieren - to complain or criticize


• der Krawall - riot