Berlin etc.

*Aboard train to Salzburg:

*Last weekend in Berlin was a lot of fun. Helen, another Burns fellow working there for the Tagesspiegel newspaper, was kind enough to host me. I spent all day Saturday with my friend Craig from Duke, his wife Jenny and four-year-old son Kyle. They have the most amazingly large apartment I’ve ever seen. He’s the Washington Post Berlin reporter, and he inherited the place from the last guy to hold that job. We went to the Berlin Zoo and hung out while Kyle enjoyed the playground. Then we rode the famous bus 100, which goes past all the noteworthy sights in Berlin. After dinner at their place, I left to join Helen with two of her friends at a great local hangout. We got into nice long discussions about religion, politics etc.

*Sunday, I saw the Jewish museum, which I thought was really amazing. Of course the Holocaust and exile were a huge influence on its contents, but it was a really comprehensive look at Jewish history, culture and traditions. The building’s architecture made a profound contribution to the experience. I went primarily to see the building and had planned to breeze through the exhibits, but I ended up lingering and reading almost all of them because I found them so interesting. Afterward, Helen met me and walked with me through Potsdamer Platz, a new development with the path of the former Berlin Wall running through it, and we saw the Holocaust memorial, the Brandenberg gate and a few other landmarks before I made my way back to my train.

*Monday, Sabra came to Frankfurt to cover the International Auto Show and she ended up staying with me after having a disastrous hotel experience. That night, we went out with Burns alum Bernd, who took us to a traditional Sachsenhausen apfelwein pub that was a lot of fun.

*Work-wise, this week I have finally made some contributions to my hosts. I had a Dow Jones wire piece go out from the International Auto Show, and then I had a byline about the German film industry run in Wall Street Journal Europe. (I’ve written another short arts review for Personal Journal Europe that should run soon).

*On a personal note, I've made a very special new friend here - he's an investment banker, Swiss originally but living in Frankfurt now. You'll have to email me if you want the details.

*A funny International Auto Show experience: I’m writing an article about Continental, which has its North American tire headquarters in Charlotte, and they invited me out to their Frankfurt test track for a journalist event in which we could test-drive cars equipped with their new technologies. One of them is a system that will automatically parallel park your car – you pull past the parking space, hit a button on your steering wheel and then the car does the rest without you. Well, my car (a BMW) swerved into one of the parked cars and smashed in one of its doors. They said it was apparently a glitch in the software, not anything I did (and I tried again and the car successfully parked the second time). But then I became noteworthy among the Continental employees and a few of the journalists there as “the one who had the wreck.” Just my luck.