Berlin, Part II

Visiting Berlin was a business trip: I was there to give a talk in a workshop on "automated parameter estimation methods for compartmental neural models" at the Organization for Computational Neuroscience's annual meeting. (It won't spoil the suspense to affirm already that it was just as exciting as it sounds.)

Family visitations were scheduled for the days prior to the start of the conference: The day after Sheketak, we slept in and then ate brunch at the KaDeWe. The Kaufhof des Westens (Department Store of the West) is the second largest department store in Europe, the continental crown jewel of consumerism.
Its seven floors house all manner of high end merchandise, including all the names of high fashion and expensive jewelry. Most impressive to me (and my parents when they visited Berlin two years ago) are the sixth and seventh floors, which are packed with food -- an astounding array of meats, cheeses, scrumptious confections, aromatic breads, wines, you name it. One could (as my father did) spend hours just salivating over the wares in their display cases.












Melanie and I were there to sample the KaDeWe's rightly renowned champagne brunch in the Silber Terrasse (Silver Terrace) Restaurant, one of Melanie's favorites. The setting is elegant, with dark wood and leather chairs, heavy silver utensils, fine china, and an excellent view of the bustling city. The waitstaff's impeccably solicitous, yet wholly unobtrusive service is wonderful; the waiters are veterans who know the names, habits and preferences of their clients, mostly regulars, so well that their favorite tables are reserved, their drinks poured, and their new coiffures comment upon when they arrive at their usual times. We observed this kind of ritual performed for a couple of conservatively well-dressed, aristocratic octogenarian ladies, clearly used to being served, who sat next to us and imbibed a couple of preprandial whiskeys before beginning their vino rosso brunch. (I should mention that the staff knew Melanie, too, though only from semi-annual or so dining, and we were attended to wonderfully.)

The one area where the KaDeWe is lacking, an area where it has declined from its former woolly glory, is yarn. There isn't much there for knitters, but we did cruise through that part of the store and picked up some goodies for The Stash.



After brunching and yarn seeking, we walked home past Berlin Zoo (former home of Knut) and stumbled across a quaint and nifty alley of streetlamp exemplars from all over Germany. In the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, most major cities in Germany produced their own streetlamps, the design of which (perhaps) expressed something of the cities' individual character. They ranged from the relatively utilitarian, probably indicating the lesser affluence of the town of origin, to dainty rococco, replete with curlicues and filigreed ironwork, imitations of Parisian style reflective of Germany's mild but longstanding envy of what is perceived to be the charm, artfulness and easy living inherent in French culture. "Leben wie Gott in Frankreich" -- to live like God in France -- is the universal German Sprichwort for The Really Good Life. Postwar streetlamps were clearly designed to meet practical demands, rather than to appeal to the people's artistic sensibilities -- though I suppose you could argue that enforced plainness of the GDR's public architecture (and it was all essentially public) was an expression of a "People's artistic sensibility", one subordinated to the political will of the Party. The rest of Thursday evening was spent at home, eating an excellent fish dinner and preparing slides for the CNS workshop talk.


Around midday Friday, needing to get out of the house for a while, we took a walk along Oranienburgerstrasse, strolling past the restored remains of the Neue Synagogue, two-thirds of which was irreparably damaged by Allied bombing during the war. The restored remainder is guarded around the clock by the Berlin police, a testament to the still uneasy conditions for Judaism in Germany. The problem is not the sentiments of the greater population, but the small, adamantine kernel of anti-Semites that seem to have an insatiable need to spread their ugliness.








Just past the Synagogue we ate a hearty lunch of Berliner specialties, then looked for a paper store, for it was a couple of days before our first anniversary -- paper. We did find a very quaint, cute one where I bought a couple of items, and we stop by a beading store, but there was not a lot of shopping to be done. We headed over to Friedrichshain, where Melanie's father and stepmother live. We had a pleasant, and interesting -- in the universally understood 'familial' sense of the word -- afternoon tea with them, Melanie's paternal grandmother, and a great uncle and aunt. 'Nuff said about that.








Saturday I was in class: the CNS ran a day of tutorials to teach the latest methods of the computational neuroscience experts to the masses. The location was great: Gendarmenmarkt, site of the beautiful Deutscher und Französicher Doms and Konzerthaus. The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences has its offices there, with a set of high quality lecture halls, which is where the tutorials were held.














The location was, sad to say, of higher quality than the tutorials themselves, which were aimed at beginning graduate students. Many of my fellow attendees had clearly just gotten off the plane and were stumbling about in the throes of jet lag. One man sitting in front of me suddenly pitched back and whacked his head against the screen of my laptop, which was perched on my knees.



The refreshments (Kaffee und Kuchen mit Sahne) were excellent (and I should take the opportunity to praise the extremely helpful and competent conference staff), but by the afternoon tutorial session I was about to succumb to similar drowsiness, so I left for home early, and walking towards the S-bahn station, I had an encounter with the seamier side of the city. Stay tuned....