Pop Quiz!

Which of the following buildings is NOT a modern art museum? No cheating with Google images either.

Jeremy Clarkson would say, "No. You're wrong." The first one is the Museum Tinguely devoted to a guy who made awesome mechanical sculptures. The second is a building, designed by the same architect actually, originally for the Swiss bank UBS and now used by the Bank of International Settlements. The third is the Contemporary Art Museum in Basel. The fourth belongs to the Fondation Beyeler (designed by Renzo Piano, the man responsible for the Menil in Houston).

Basel is a town that is serious about it's architecture, which makes it even more of a shame that I couldn't afford any of their freaking museums (including the, well the architecture museum). Museums like this one:  

That's the Schaulager. It was designed by Basel superstar architects Herzog and de Meuron, who are most famous internationally for the Bird's Nest, the Olympic stadium used in Beijing. Fans of the beautiful game may also recognize some of their other work.

The Schaulager is located in a place called Dreispitz. All of the local tourist information says so. What they do not say is that Dreispitz is a 150 acre industrial park that you can't walk through and the tram stop called Dreispitz is on one end, while the Schaulager is on the other. It's a good thing that I enjoy walking or I might be bitter about the experience.

As I tricked you into noticing, everyone gets in on the modern architecture act in Basel or will be, not just the cool museums. Even Novartis, the pharmaceutical giant will be getting a new ultra-modern look after they are done tearing down their old industrial park.

I could have watched that crane tear down that building all day. It was the only thing a member of the public could do around the Novartis campus anyway, which is why there are no pictures of the rest of it.

I would have taken pictures of Frank Gehry's Vitra Design building, but I had already walked 6 or so km that day and needed to walk 6 more to get back to Basel since I was fairly deep into Germany at that point for a pedestrian. By the time I would have reached the Vitra, it would have been closed anyway.

The shame of all this ultra-modern architecture for me was that, unlike Berlin, I didn't know how to read the buildings, to understand their purpose and their place. The Fondation Beyeler is in Riehen, far away from Basel's city center. Vitra is in Germany as I mentioned. The bank buildings locations make sense - the one from Botta is located on one of the main squares in Basel, called Aeschenplatz and the other building, which actually the main building is across the trams from the main train station. It's also across the street from a five star Hilton. And it looks much cooler:

I guess my quest to experience the architecture of Basel without a proper guide was about the same as taking pictures of their beautiful mountain landscapes: I don't have any idea what it meant, I just liked the view. I like to understand the world around me a little more than that, but finding beautiful views was a great way to spend a week in Basel anyway.

A Return to the Scene of Several Crimes

I am not generally a fan of nostalgia. Fond memories tend to color and eventually alter reality completely if too much sentiment is attached to them. As such, I knew that a return to Munich, especially after ten years, would make a bit of a hypocrite out of me, because I would not be able to resist, at least for a day or two, indulging in a few misty walks down memory lane. I know that many of you are eager to hear about what happened in Basel over a week ago now and many of you may not have known that I spent a week in Amsterdam and I will get to all of that. Eventually.

Carrie was kind enough to lend me her U-Bahn pass and so I did what any JYMer who lived in the Studenstadt would do with access to the U-Bahn: I took a trip down the U6 (Carrie happens to live on that line already - just on the opposite side of town). Munich is in the process of upgrading it's subway cars, but  many of them are still the dingy blue and white ones we all know and love. It was just the cars that looked the same; somehow the U-Bahn has managed to smell the same as well. Truly, uncanny.

Even more uncanny was my arrival in StuSta. My legs were on automatic pilot. They took me right, down the hall, past the posters, up the stairs to the right and then a left, past all the recycling containers, followed by the sign and the crazy three dimensional bronze rendering of the map of StuSta which couldn't be more useless if it tried. I bore a little bit left aiming for the green, crossing Christoph-Probst and ducking into the little bit of greenery amongst all the cement of the StuSta. It was as though nothing had changed. The tall green house looked cleaner. The orange house was a bit dingier and Pot was advertising it's presence im Orangenhaus. TriBühne had just open for business, but with the hint of winter in the air, they hadn't bothered to set up the tables outside. I would have eaten there, but it was a bit early in the day for it. I contemplated taking pictures of the place, trying to fix it forever, as forever as digital bits can be, but I decide that there will be no pictures. The faceless buildings belong to us and our memories. It's nice that it hasn't changed (at least on the outside) since we were there, it validated my trip down memory lane in a way. I was not wrong to come here: the orange building practically begged to see if the elevator had changed at all. But I contented myself with the outward view of the buildings, ducked by the blue house, with a nod to our old haunt in Eric's room, took a left past the bicycle rack (which been placed in a front of a sign that says you are not allowed to lean bikes against the door) and straight out onto Ungererstrasse, with just one look back, and a good laugh at the giant Franziskaner monk smiling, toasting the road with his beer from the orange house.

The walk from Ungererstrasse to Münchner Freiheit and Schwabing is a long one and most of the time we took that walk it was late at night and we were not paying attention to the view, which really doesn't exist; it's not a street with a view, just great wide swaths of concrete to help you get where you are going. I was going to Leopoldstrasse to see which of our favorite restaurants were still there. Along the way, some strangers were accosted by a crazy person, which was also reassuringly familiar. I was momentarily lost looking for Parea, the great like Greek restaurant that served a grill platter fit to split the incautious diner in two. But I got my bearings back, went one street further down and found, much to my delight and surprise that Parea is, in fact, still in business. And still serving the grill platter. I am no longer in my prime as far as putting back the found goes, so there is no way I will test myself against that mighty platter during this trip, not without reinforcements anyway (it was all I could manage to get through an entire McDonald's value meal - an unfortunate necessity when Travelex traps your money on a credit card, which is a terrible terrible idea when you are going to Germany). Not only is Parea still in business, but Cafe Adria is still serving up Calzone, though considering the current exchange rate, it is no longer as günstig as it used to be (for you non-German speakers, that means good value for money, the exact english word is escaping me at the moment). Still, both places are now on my list of places to go while I am still here. We spent more time at the Adria, but we enjoyed Parea's food more, so I'm aiming for that one.

As I was walking back down Leopoldstrasse, I realized that with my camera now firmly digital, it would be time to visit that cemetery whose name I can never remember (der Altnördlicher Friedhof, which I always confuse with Westfriedhof for some reason). I've been wanting to film something here every since I stumbled on to it. I managed to take a few pictures before the raindrops forced me to put the camera away. Sadly, I didn't the ravens until it was too late. Now I have to go back. Can you imagine how awesome that picture would be? A shaft of light through the trees, illuminating a raven standing on someone's tombstone? In yet another validation of my first full walking day in Munich, this cemetery was exactly as I remember it, a beautiful solemn place in the fall just before all the leaves are stripped off the trees.

After my picture taking session, I headed to the JYM office and discovered much to my disgust that McDonald's still occupies it's accustomed place across the street. I didn't go near it, but a placard on a wall announced Subway's continued presence as well. The JYM door was closed (as I recall, we had not yet begun our classes at this point, so I was not surprised), so that will have to wait for another day. I ducked around the corner and down the side street to our favorite chinese place and I was finally greeted with disappointment: Der kleine Chinese had closed, though I suspect this is a recent development. The name was still on the restaurant and all of the tables and chairs were still inside. The little white paper attached to the window announced that it was for rent. I was mildly disappointed, but that did not last because my next trip was to Cinema where the Friday night sneak lives on (and hopefully I will be able to go - being at 11:15 at night always makes it an adventure to catch the U-Bahn home).

At that point, I was quite tired and I went, as I mentioned to McDonald's to get rid of the last money on Travelex's stupid card (I have never waited more anxiously for a card to say that the charge has been approved) and then I explored Marienplatz, another area of the city that has remained more or less unchanged. At this time of year, the whole pedestrian area smells like chestnuts and roasted candied almonds (the almonds are definitely on the list, but they didn't make any sense after McD's). The major change was the addition of an Apple store (a real one, from Apple and everything - have you seen the new iPod nano? Holy cow, it's cool), and a few churches are undergoing renovation, etc. One thing had changed - instead of a Planet Hollywood across the street from the Hofbräuhaus, they have an actual Hard Rock Cafe (which tells you all you need to know about the Hofbräuhaus, doesn't it?). I don't suppose that is much different.

My next task is to explore the parts of Munich that I never managed to discover before (and getting everyone up to date on the rest of my travels, I know, I know). I can only hope that will be as successful as today was.

Hmm, Basel

My stay in Basel began with my first experience as a Couch Surfer. For those of you who don't know, CouchSurfing.org is the Internet 2.0 version of traveling couches. In other words, it is no longer necessary to have met someone in person before agreeing to let them spend one or more nights in their place. I desperately needed to save some money on the Basel section of my travels, so I decided to give it a try for that reason, but I'm also not particularly suited to striking up conversations with the random strangers in my hostels (I will leave that to Mom). CouchSurfing promised a stronger personal connection with someone and a chance for some real conversation, something I missed.

I did not stumble on to this idea myself, Renee and Sarah introduced me to it when they served as hosts themselves. I know what some of you are thinking: how can it be safe for perfect strangers to agree to spend the night in a house over the internet? CouchSurfing is aware of the safety issues and allows people a chance to fill out quite a lot of information about themselves allowing hosts and guests to match each other relatively well and as a way of getting through places like Berlin and New York where there are tens of thousands of couches to be had. CouchSurfing also offers a couple of other safety features including references from past hosts and guests, as well as friends and address and rudimentary identity verification. It's not foolproof, but then neither is booking a hotel over the Internet.

I started out looking for couches in Berlin, but it turns out in CouchSurfing and in hostels, you still have to plan ahead; all of my prospective hosts were booked. I figured that was going to be true in any big that I tried, so I tried a smaller one in Basel and immediately got two hits. One of them fell through (he didn't have anything on his profile anyway), but the other was Anders Nättorp, a Swedish transplant who has spent 18 years in Switzerland (many of them in Lausanne). He was so generous, taking me out to eat in this ridiculously expensive city (McD's "value" meals start at 11 Swiss Francs, which is more or less at parity with the dollar. That's right, a Big Mac meal costs more than 11 dollars) as well as giving some great trips on what to do in and around the city. It was an incredible experience. Anders is a chemical engineer and he was able to fill me in on some of things I am missing out on thanks to that year in Germany. Very cool, for him as well, as I suspect most people don't geek out over his work at Nescafe or phosphorus cycles in Egypt, but I sure did.

The last few days in Basel, I have spent at the Y, which has made up for charging me that outrageous cancellation fee (excuse me, YMCA, but you did not lose the room - I cancelled before check in time, that is the worst excuse ever) by having proper showers, a less flaky than Starbucks internet connection, and a mobility card that makes public transport free. It almost makes up for the fact that breakfast isn't included. Almost.

There's lots more to say about Basel, but I figured a short introduction to my stay here would be a good idea. I came to Basel because of my great uncle Gerry, who went to school here. The city offers the deadly combination of being on the German border (and thus accessible by my Eurail pass), in Switzerland, and a reputation for art and architecture that it has certainly lived up to. It's also not that big a city, so a quick trip outside of the city leads to landscapes like the one you see below. In case you were wondering.

What's Gedenktafel got to do with it?

When you do something completely crazy, like quit your job and put off moving to a place where you can get a job so you can wander around Europe for oh say six weeks, there are times when you can't help but wonder: What the hell am I doing? Why am I here?

What do you do in those moments when it verges on panic and the only thing keeping you from panicking is the very real fact that you have absolutely no way to undo what you have done? 4000 miles don't untravel themselves. You are here to stay. So, you wander the streets of this foreign metropolis because if you are going to indulge in folly, you shouldn't go for half measures - do it all the way or don't do it at all, don't dabble. If you wonder what you are wandering around for, there is nothing to do but wander as resolutely and thoroughly as possible.

Berlin, as I mentioned, is a city full of history, but it's also in a country that is at times obsessed with history and with remembering history. Sometimes history means remembering the weighty and devastating events that shape a nation. Sometimes, it means remembering that Ukrainian nurse or the first German female rabbi. Gedenktafel are strewn throughout the city of Berlin. I had one particular Tafel that I remembered from my first trip here, but as I began looking for them, I couldn't stop seeing them. And I couldn't stop taking pictures of them (which will eventually show up here when I have a less flaky internet connection). Sometimes it was the sad state of the current building that drew my eye. Or it was the kind of chilling juxtaposition that is inevitable in a city with the dark secrets of Berlin: a memorial to two Communists murdered by the Nazis on the outside wall of McDonald's. I came to love finding these Tafel and making people notice them when I took a picture of it (nothing like taking a picture to draw people's eyes), even to the ridiculous and random, like the former site of the Berlin Aquarium on Unter den Linden.

There are of course copious amounts of signs of all shapes and sizes describing the Wall or the Nazi history of Berlin; it is impossible to walk down Wilhelmstrasse without encountering something that reminds people that the Nazis set up shop there. And one particular monumental and obviously government building had the good luck of being home to the Nazis (Göring himself), the Soviets, the leaders of the DDR (sorry, can't type GDR), and now the Bundesministerium der Finanzen. The building should be tiled with Tafel. Berlin remembers more than the Nazis of course, but the odds on favorites after the Communists and the Nazis are the Prussians. You can't walk down Unter den Linden without dealing with Prussian history and its Greco-roman inspired monuments to making monument.

But sometimes you are wandering through the city and the city is just a city and it doesn't matter where you are because your feet still hurt. Traveling has not changed your life or solved any of your problems. What happens then? For me, by sheer accident originally, I stumbled on a random building away from the main streets and places that Berlin wants you to see and you find a reminder of the kind of incredible history that has taken place here. A reminder of something that has nothing to do with Nazis or soldiers or Friedrich or Wilhelm or any combination of thereof, that has nothing to do with war or massacre, but is quite simply about changing the world. It might be a TV studio now, but in 1905 it contained the lecture hall where Max Planck introduced the world to quantum physics. I see a reminder like that and for a moment at least, it is a little clearer, exactly what I am doing here.

Why Berlin?

I started this blog because I had an epiphany while I was writing in my journal about the experiences of my day. The practical upshot of that is that I started the whole thing in the middle of a particular line of thought, most of which my audience was not privy to. In the hopes of rectifying that error, I think it's time to explain my itinerary, or at least Berlin, the first stop.

It all started ten years ago (almost to the day as one of my friends reminded me), I began my Junior Year in Munich experience, which would change my life forever. It's fun to be able say something that melodramatic and have it be accurate as well. I was supposed to be a chemist or an engineer. And I had done a lot of work and put a ton of effort into that whole becoming an engineer or a chemist thing. Turns out, at Case your junior year is when all of that really gets shaken out, sort of the meat of the major takes over. But instead of spending that year in a lab and cursing my clumsiness with partial differential equations in physical chemistry, I spent it in Germany studying about the nature of reading and Aristotle's poetics. That meant that I was never going to be able to finish my chemistry degree without adding another year to my schooling. Since I could not also add another year to my scholarship, I took the German degree and sort of ran with it. Ten years down the road, I have no degree in Chemistry, I do have another degree in Germanic Studies, and I work in theatre. Which all makes a kind of sense, to someone, I suppose. And now, in another attempt to change careers, or really to settle into the career I always wanted, but never really knew how to get into, I found myself with some time. It was time to travel.

My time in Germany with JYM didn't just change my life by accidentally altering my career path. I met incredible people and visited incredible places. After 11 months in Munich, I got to know it and came to love it (apparently, this is a difficult thing to do if you are just backpacking through the place). And I will be visiting Munich as well, of course during Oktoberfest, and hopefully for the twentieth Tag der deutschen Einheit. But for 10 days in February, I was captivated by the city of Berlin. Ten days didn't seem like enough and I always wanted to experience it in more depth without the pressure of class and a time crunch.

Berlin fascinates me in a way that few other cities have managed. Long before I became a German major, way back in 4th grade, I began to consume whatever information I could find about World War II, indeed the first book on the subject that I can remember reading is William Shirer's personal account of his time in Berlin called The Nightmare Years (I should probably read that book again . . . ). The book made me intimately familiar with much of Berlin's history during this time. One of the first memories that I have of the news, of the outside world, is of the Berlin Wall coming down. I distinctly remember Mom and Dad making me stop whatever I was doing so that I could pay attention to history as it was happening. Between those two formative events, I was primed to fall in love with Berlin after the fall of the wall, a little over a decade later. Millions of Americans are as well. I am annoyed to think that I came from such a cliched touristy place, but . . . well, I did.

It was the combination of the original ten days in Berlin, as well as the academic training that took the spark and turned it into a flame. Now I am armed with cultural training about the construction of monuments and the meaning of public spaces and how architecture speaks. Berlin is a deadly combination of all of those things, since its history is so layered with monumental architecture, awful things, beautiful redemptive things, and a culture that is attuned to that history and rarely makes big decisions without referencing or acknowledging the weight of the past, and that includes the more radical, creative part of the city as well. Looked at in this way, the question isn't why Berlin? The question is why would I go anywhere else? And for a long time, I thought about it, not going anywhere else, except for Munich which is indispensable, even if it wasn't Oktoberfest (still have never heard a satisfactory explanation of why something that starts in the middle of September and only ever has a couple of days in October, gets called Oktoberfest). But in the end, the draw of the new, of other places that I always meant to discover but never did (Basel and Switzerland, Amsterdam, and Brussels) was too much. I couldn't be that close to them again and not go. Again.

I was originally going to talk a little bit more about the fascinating history of Berlin, now that I have elaborated on the fact that I am fascinated by it, but I think I will save that for my next post. The last one that will be made from Berlin, though assuredly not the last one about Berlin.

The Berliner Ensemble

Now that I am in theatre, I have an entirely different evaluation of my original time in Berlin. Over the course of ten days, we were bombarded with information and theatrical performances. At least seven of the ten nights featured a trip to one theatre or another. I enjoyed it a great deal, despite not being able to understand the majority of what was being said. One of those trips to the theatre was to see a production of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Uis) by the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre company that Brecht helped to found in 1949.

Strictly speaking, the Berliner Ensemble is just that: the group of actors and designers who collaborate on the shows together. They are merely renting their current home, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, a neo-baroque (at least on the inside) place built around the turn of the century. The twentieth century. To be clear, it was built in the 1890s. When I think of Brecht and challenging experimental theatre, I have a particular idea of what the stage and the space will be like. It'll be a black box, or a multi-functional space, or anything other than a neo-baroque theatre that feels like a mini opera house. It feels tiny, even though at 738 seats, it has only slightly fewer seats than the Hubbard Theatre at the Alley. It feels crammed in because many of the seats, particularly in the upper reaches of the house don't properly face the stage, wrapping around the wall of the house. That includes the standing room place I watched the show from (a 2.25 hour production with no intermission and minimal air conditioning - good thing I layered). There are mirrors everywhere, walls are practically falling over with sconces, everything is gilded and just gaudy. And on its stage, Brecht and his Ensemble speak truth to power all the time, often in plays about the dirty and the poor, which are all the more powerful for the contradiction and the tension between the building and the work going on inside it. One of my favorite touches in the building is a red X that has been spray painted through the Imperial eagle. According to legend, Brecht climbed a ladder himself to deface it, the only part of the building that is deliberately less pretty than it originally set out to be (these days the building is under Denkmalschutz, so I imagine they could do whatever they want with it, if they phrased it delicately enough to the right people).

Naturally, I gawked at the lights as I was standing around and I couldn't but note some of the more interesting technical elements on display (hey, VL1000s, I know those pieces of junk), including the Niethammer EniZoom.One thing that struck me was that they use a ton of power. I don't think I saw a light with less than a 1000W of output and most of them were at 2000, easily.

There's nothing quite like seeing a Brecht show in his theatre and that made Arturo Ui special. Unfortunately, this time around I was not able to see a Brecht, though in a couple of days (sadly after I leave Berlin) they will mount a production of Mutter Courage. Now THAT would be a show to see in Brecht's theatre. The show that I saw is called Der zerbrochene Krug by Heinrich Kleist. I guess you would translate it into the shattered pitcher or the destroyed ewer or something (no, Wikipedia says it is The Broken Jug, which is nowhere near as evocative to me). It's a very interesting piece for the BE to do. On the face of it, the play is a simple farce about a randy village judge who gets caught by the district inspector. But of course, it's really about corruption and the choices that are necessary in order to stand up to corruption among the powerful. It's also hilarious (I understood 2/3 of it this time, including some of the sarcasm). It was also masterfully performed, which is hard to do when a third of the cast basically doesn't move from their position for half of the show. It is not an easy show for a director to do. I can't really judge the set or the lights since could only see about half of the stage what with the whole standing room thing (but hey, it was five euro, can't beat that). The acting really brought it all together. The Ensemble remains a great company and this production had a great director in Peter Stein. The production I saw featured Klaus Maria Brandauer who most English speaking audiences will know only from Never Say Never Again (he's the bad guy), which is a shame (he's a legend on the German stage and he's Oedipus at Colonus with Peter Stein is supposed to be incredible).  I may not have been able to see Brecht's company do Brecht, but I was very happy to see this show as well. I just wish I had the time and the money to see more of the great theatre that happens here in Berlin.

Let's Talk About Cars

I like cars. Anybody who has talked with me for any length of time will eventually be bombarded by a list of my favorite Top Gear episodes. If you have a TV, I have almost certainly asked you if you get BBC America, in an attempt to convert someone else. One of the more exciting aspects of getting to be in Europe is seeing some of the more incredible European cars up close and personal. You know, like the Bugatti Veyron, just in case you forgot:

So you can imagine how excited I was about seeing an advertisement for a Ferrari dealership (which I did not take a picture of. I figured I would wait until I got there). I was so excited about it that I took off once again into the Wild West of Berlin. I am averse to spending the money on public transport, so I walked (open that link in a new tab or a new window so you can keep reading). Yes, you saw that correctly. I walked 13 km (matching my highest total to date - and I haven't even gotten dinner yet.

I was prepared to take a lot of pictures when I got there, but that was just when I thought I was going to a Ferrari dealership. Instead, I found this: the MeilenWerk. It was a smorgasbord of cars, classic cars, exotic cars. It's an entire old train shed turned into a small devotional to the absolute best of the automotive sciences. There was a Jaguar XJ 220, another Veyron, several Dinos, an Enzo, a DB5. The Jaguar XJ 220 was on sale. On sale! Many of the other cars were for rent, and the rest were stored there, generously put on view by their owners. You could see the dirt in the grill on Veyron, proving that the owner actually took it out on the streets occasionally. I thought I was going to take pictures, but how could I do justice to the astounding cars around me. In the end, only one car deserved to have it's photo taken:

That is a Lamborghini. The Diablo, I believe.

And that's a bumper sticker. An enduring testament that having money has nothing to do with taste or brains (at least they support the arts - the worst offender there was an Aston that someone in Switzerland turned into a Kombi, a station wagon).

I couldn't bring myself to take any other pictures for the exact same reason that I don't really like going to zoos. It's not really any fun getting those pictures or being in zoos. It's much more fun to catch them in the wild. Obviously, the analogy is not exact; most of us are never going to see a polar bear in the wild. There is always a shot at seeing a Ferrari (or hearing one. I had the distinct pleasure of listening the engine of a 612 California purr it's way into the engine bay). And I cheated with the Veyron, which was in a show room. There are only 200 of them in existence (they cost 1.7 million dollars and it costs Volkswagen at least twice that to make them), so I don't feel so bad about it (like catching that endangered Asian something or other at the zoo).

By some miracle, the way home also featured the Audi showroom, the Mercedes Show Building, the BMW floor (that was on the way there actually), the Lambo show room (and the Vantage parked behind it), the Harley dealership, and the Chrysler dealership, which stood out in the same way the Hooters under the S-Bahn did. I guess I get it, but really, just why?

I've got a few other automotive surprises up myself (including an Aston DB-9 Volante and a vintage Bentley, both on the Gendarmemarkt), but today was a day devoted to cars and the lengths I will walk to visit them.

American Convenience in Berlin

Food is everywhere in the streets of Berlin, which is a major bummer when your food budget is in the single digits. Fast food, Slow-Food, fine dining, authentic Bavarian cuisine, you name it and some representative of it is crammed onto the crowded streets of Berlin, particularly on pedestrian heavy streets like Friedrichstraße and Unter den Linden. When it comes to fast food in Mitte, the part of Berlin that I've spent most of my time, there are a couple of American fast food joints that stick out for me, not only because they are American. I have to emphasize that this about Stadt-Mitte. My poor tired feet have wandered all over this area, but have only made into the western part of the city three times and only as far as Charlottenburg (the big palace on the west end that gives that area of the city it's name and isn't really a Burg at all, but I suppose that's another post). I can't speak for the area that Western culture has spent the longest amount of time colonizing. An annoying sign on one particular building swears that McDonald's has fifty stores in the city, but I've only seen five, all within sight of a train station (except for the one at Checkpoint Charlie, but come on, that's the center of Americana in Berlin).

As I mentioned, there are two franchises that stand out. Dunkin' Donuts is the first and you find it everywhere that there is a serious amount of foot traffic, including the swankiest parts of the city: Friedrichstraße, the KuDamm, Unter den Linden, and the Sony Center. I think this is kind of strange since coffee and sweet baked goods are something that Europeans have excelled at longer than Dunkin' Donuts has existed. I have a vivid memory of eating the donuts in Prague and being distinctly disappointed in them. That has kept me from trying them now, so I don't know if they have gotten better. I have reservations. I know their coffee is better. It could just be a tourist thing of course, all of those high foot traffic areas I mentioned are tourism magnets

Subway, on the other hand, has managed to find its way onto quite a few streets that have little, if anything, to do with tourists at all. Berlin is a tourist magnet (I believe someone mentioned that it is the third most visited city in Europe, after London and Paris), so, in the middle of city, you will never be entirely free of tourists, but they are decidedly less dense in places like Prenzlauer Berg and the border between Wedding and Mitte. But the fact is, if you wander off the beaten path, there are good odds you can get your 5 euro foot long (something is lost in the translation since 5 euro is not cheap in the slightest). I was initially surprised by Subway's apparent success, or at least it's ubiquity, but then I realized that Subway sandwiches are just a variation on a much older bakery theme: belegtes Brot, a staple of Bäckereien/Konditoreien everywhere. They are not threatened in the least by Subway, don't go feeling bad for the natives, they are doing quite well. Right now, it seems like everything in Berlin is doing well or headed that way. Twenty years after re-unification there is still much to do, including renovating all the stuff that they put off renovating when they needed to start renovating.

The only variation that Subway offers on the belegtes Brot theme is that you get to choose what you beleg the Brot with as it were (apologies to those who know what the German should be). The subs that offer the same kind of meats and cheeses are priced competitively, but quickly soar when non-traditional combinations (like Sweet Onion Chicken Teryiaki) are on offer. Germany is a country starved of good service, so adding service to a familiar item is a great business move. I have not been impressed with the quality of the sandwiches nor with the service itself, but then again I have certain expectations when it comes to service. The reasons that Germans are starved for service are as much cultural as economic and procedural, so the Subway experience here isn't going to blow any Americans away. And since I'm on a value kick, the Bäckerei offers better value as well.

Now, I bet when I said I was going to talk about American restaurants not called McDonald's, you thought I was going to talk about Starbucks. You did, didn't you? Their, uh, colonial ambitions are legendary (and were legendary even in 2000). And you will find Starbucks everywhere you will find people who want to be cool, who are cool, or who just want to look at the cool people (that brings us back to Friedrichstraße, where I was inspired to write this). Starbucks has accomplished something completely different from Subway or Dunkin' Donuts. Cafe culture is also older than Starbucks and they also offer essentially the same concept - a well understood part of European food culture offered back to them with an American emphasis on service and choice. Subway and Dunkin' occupy niches, expanding on a tiny part of what already existed; Starbucks hit European food culture where it lives. There are no Subway clones, it stands alone, but Starbucks has at least two major chains who do exactly the same thing that Starbucks does without being Starbucks (Einstein and Balzac - they are found quite a bit more often than Starbucks and a Starbucks is never completely free of such competition - Germans are sensitive about globalization).

Starbucks hasn't just inspired clones, I feel like it has revolutionized coffee delivery as well, by introducing the idea of having it on the go. You see "Coffee to Go" advertised everywhere in the city, with only variations on the spelling of coffee. Every Imbiss, Bistro, Cafe, Spätverkauf, and Curry stand offers "Coffee to Go." Sadly, I am not a nutritional anthropologist or a food historian, so maybe I'm getting cause and effect wrong here and Starbucks cannot be credited with this cultural shift. I only have the experience of two distinct points in time (though I visited my first Balzac in 2000, so Starbucks has been pushing boundaries and buttons in Germany for at least a decade), so perhaps someone with a more continuous experience in Germany can tell me about the development of this "Coffee to Go" concept. Starbucks didn't invent it in the States either, but they way they do business forced McDonald's, even in the States, to respond to a market that had a brand new sense of how it should be served. I could be wrong, but if you can make McD's change its business model, I don't think I'm too far off in giving them credit for "Coffee to Go."