German
Categories: uncategorized
Date: 01 August 2005 18:08:17
I've spent the last week in Berlin, mostly at a language conference. Going to a language conference in a country where you don't speak the language is an odd concept. I have always been interested in language, and love learning languages, but hardly speak any German - mainly food words, as I spent a few months living with a German family with three children, but not in Germany, and they only spoke German at the dinner table. So I can read about 1/3 of the menu, and The Spouse™ can read about another 1/3 - until we got a dictionary, we made sure not to order off the remaining third. The tripe incident in Paris is still in our minds...
But the conference itself was good, as was the shopping (oops - well, 3 pairs of shoes for €115 can hardly be turned down, can they?). People liked my papers and hopefully someone else likes another paper sufficiently to invite me to an Important Conference in Boston in November, and lots of people gave me their cards, and it was all lovely, though my brain is now officially Full.
Berlin is also very interesting and striking, and parts of it are beautiful, though parts have flats that look, not surprisingly, like the East German-built flats in Tanzania, only in a better state of repair. We had a fascinating walking tour including a lot of history that I hadn't understood - since I tend to bypass all those million programmes on the Nazis on the History Channel - saw Checkpoint Charlie, read about lots of weird and whacky East German escape attempts, and how they accidentally let everyone through the wall in 1989(!), and ate lots of cake. Oops again. We also saw the very moving Holocaust Memorial: here's a photo The Spouse™' took of it.
