Back in Berlin for the Berlinale

A grueling 18 hours of traveling, including several unexpected hours of layover due to a delayed connection in Frankfurt, brought me to Berlin yesterday. It was my first return since the fellowship, to attend the Berlinale film festival.

It's cold but not brutally so - the bigger problem is the snow, which is extremely wet, gray and gloomy. Berlin is a bit more complicated to navigate than Frankfurt, I'm finding. The Berlinale is being held at Potsdamer Platz, a glittering city square filled with brand-new high rises. (It's on a site that was formerly the "no man's land" between the walls separating east and west Berlin). I found my way to the press center but was too tired to stay for the opening screening of Sigourney Weaver's latest, "Snow Cake," or try to catch sight of the red carpet arrivals. Everyone was dressed up in evening dresses for the premiere - a big difference from Sundance, where people show up at screenings still dressed in whatever they went skiing in that day.

I'm staying in a lovely, enormous apartment on the eastern side of Berlin in an up-and-coming area filled with new restaurants of every imaginable variety - we went for Thai last night (I felt truly international while trying to decipher a Thai menu written in German). My hosts are Christina and Peter, who I met through one of the people I was on the Burns fellowship with. Christina works for the German Foreign Service as a diplomat in the cultural affairs area. Peter works for SAP and has been away on business so I haven't seen him yet.

I'm off now to catch my first screenings of the day!