Dateline France, Report 14 March 6, 1990 I am finding out that my reports have a large secondary readership. They are getting passed on to students, colleagues, and relatives. I even know of one tertiary reader. So hello to Paula Peletier, Mark Foster, my folks, Jay Cushman, Jane Novick and the editorial staff at Morgan Kaufmann, among others. At the end of January I spent a week in Berlin giving a week-long short course on object-oriented database systems. It went pretty well, but suffered a bit from the field still being fragmentary and hard to present in a cohesive fashion. I will be teaching it again in June, and will be able to use my readings book then, which should help. I arrived a day early, so the organizers could get a cheaper fare. It turned out to be a good idea, because it gave me a day to look around and plenty of time to review my slides for the first day. Since I had been in Berlin a couple times before, I the places I visited are not "first choices" of things to see, put places I hadn't yet visited. [I didn't go over to East Berlin. Although as of 1 January it is easy for West Germans to cross into East Germany, there are still the lines, fees and paperwork for Americans. I figured that things will be simplified by June, and I will go then.] The first place I visited was the Postal and Communications Museum. A small museum, but nicely done. There was an interesting exhibit on the optical telegraph that stretched across Germany at one point. It consisted of a series of towers with a six-armed pantograph on each. Each tower watched the previous one, and relayed the configurations of the pantograph to the next one. If you think about, you realize only the guys at the very end need any brains, to look up the signals, and translate signals to words. The stations inbetween only need to be able to duplicate what they see on the top of the next tower. I also watched a short film about airmail to Brazil in the 1930s. It involved several changes of planes to get it there. The trans-Atlantic portion seemed to be in some kind of ground-effect airplane, which flew only a few yards from the surface of the ocean. Next I headed over to the wall, near the Brandenburg Gate. About two blocks away you can hear the wall--the clinking of hammers and chisels of people breaking pieces of it off. All up and down the wall were people getting souvenirs. I walked around picking up chips of it that flew off in the process. Goetz Graefe informs me that I am trafficking in stolen Official East German State Property. There were actually East German soldiers on the Western side of the wall in places were it sits back from the border. They were not stopping anyone from chipping away. There were people selling pieces camped up and down the wall, but the persons really making the money were two kids who would rent you a hammer and chisel for 2DM for 10 minutes. I saw a lot of tourists having their pictures taken breaking off a piece of the wall. Looking at the wares of wall-sellers, what commands a good price is pieces of the smooth, original surface with spray paint on them. However, I also noticed that prices seemed to go by linear dimension, so there are about 16 2DM chunks in a 10DM slab. If I didn't have something to do that week already, I could have tried to make my fortune jobbing pieces of the wall. (I expect there is also money to be made by someone with access to a demolition site and a few cans of spray paint.) I did a rough calculation, based on the wall averaging 1 square meter in cross section and being about 360 kilometers long. (Remember, it goes around most of West Berlin, not just along the dividing line with East Berlin.) I figured there are about 20cc of wall for every person in the world. If you haven't got yours, write your congressman. There were also several vendors selling East German Army hats, uniforms and insigna. Wonder where those came from. Further down near the wall were some of the crosses that are erected in memory of those who died trying to cross it. I saw one for Inya Krueger (my mother's maiden name) 31.1.46--10.12.61. Also one for someone who died in an attempted balloon escaped in March 89, which really brought home how rapidly changes have happened there. After visiting the wall, I walked through the Tiergarten. Part of my walk took me through an outdoor sculpture exhibit. I ended up at a weekend flea market down near the Technical University of Berlin (near where my course was taught). More East German Army materiel, along with books, recycled brass fixtures, clothing, housewares and what have you. I was able to buy there my favorite ambulatory snack in Berlin, a "donner kebab". This is a Turkish variation of a Greek gyro sandwich, the main difference being that it is served in a quarter of a round, inch-thick loaf of bread, rather than rolled up in pita. Consequently there is less yogurt sauce down ones sleave. Abutting the flea market is an arts and crafts market. Some wonderful weaving, and lots of wall art: photos, miniature recreations, tastefully mounted wall fragments. In the afternoon I went to the Aquarium at the zoo. It was quite crowded with parents and kids, but I was able to get good looks at things nonetheless. I saw several species of fish of kinds I had not imagined to exist. My favorite was a fish from Thailand that had whiskers three times the length of its body. It used them as "curb feelers" when skimming along close to rocks, but could also orient them ahead to detect obstacles. Also an extensive exhibit of large tropical fish. Upstairs were amphibians, reptiles and insects. More kinds of walking sticks than I knew existed, the largest of which qualified as "walking limbs". That night I was delighted to find out the hotel carried a satellite sports channel, and would get to watch the Superbowl. After no American football all fall, I thought myself lucky to catch the Superbowl, of all possible games. But there were technical difficulties, and I all they showed was a continuous loop of Joe Montana throwing a touchdown pass. It was interesting to flip around the channels and try to guess what language they were in. German, French, English and Italian were easy to tell. There were a couple others I pegged for Danish and either Polish or Czhech. Also a local Turkish station. Turks are the largest group of foreigners in Berlin, most there as guest workers. They are worried about being displaced from their jobs and housing by East German emmigres. During the week, the course kept me busy, and I didn't get out much. I did stroll around the Kurfurstendamm, Kaiser Wilhelm Church and Europa Center, which were close to my hotel. I would try to figure out who the East Germans were by their clothes, then see what they were buying. On the whole, they weren't buying much, except for groceries and pornography. Whenever I went to a newstand to buy a paper, people were always 3-deep around the adult magazines. One afternoon we did break early, and I went over to see "Green Week" at the Messegelande--a big exposition center to the west of downtown. This exposition has been held for many years, and features produce of different countries and German states, livestock exhibits, farm machinery, flowers, gardening supplies and many sewing machine salesmen. Kind of a giant state fair without the rides. Some of the juxtapositions were unfortunate, like a ham sandwich stand near the hog pens. Many of the booths from central and eastern European contries were frying up wonderful concoction in enormous frying pans--cast iron and close to a meter in diameter. I had some of a Hungarian rice and sauerkraut dish that was wonderful. I was amazed at the number of countries represented, from all continents. Colombia featured fruits from other planets, while at the Bolivian restaurant you could have smoked pirhana. I tried some Argentine wine (they should stick to cows), Icelandic lox, Moroccan sweets and a Maltese cheese cake. We had wanted to try this specialty in Malta, but we seemed to get to the bakeries too late in the day. It is nothing to do with New York style cheesecake. It is a savory, not sweet, confection, made with phyllo-like pastry and stuffed with a soft white cheese. Some countries had entire floors or halves of floors (the Spanish covered theirs with ceramic tile), while others shared a single booth with their geographic neighbors. Albania had a booth to itself, and was doing a big business in answering questions, like "How did you get them to let you out of the country?" (I figured out later that many of the booths were staffed mainly by local people, either people from the country currently living in Germany, or Germans with some connection to the country. Importers, for example.) The most popular event, after the "Parade of Bulls", was the square- dancing demonstration in the US area. Popcorn and bourbon also sold well. My last night in Berlin I went over to see the Technology and Transport museum, having read in a recent brochure that it was open late, and having heard a new computer exhibit had just been opened. When I got there, I found a hand-lettered sign on the door giving new winter hours (which did not include the current moment). If I'd known, I might have gone to the Sugar Museum instead. I headed over to the Wall Museum, which is open late (until past 10). This is a private museum adjacent to Checkpoint Charlie that has wall-related art, information on rights and freedom movements worldwide, and documents successful and unsuccessful escape attempts from the East. Of course the easiest way to get to West Berlin is to come in legally, which you can do if you are disabled or retired and a drain on East German finances. During the early days of the wall, when it was mostly cinderblock, brute-force sometimes worked. People would put additional reinforcement around an old truck and try to bash their way through. Stealing a bus and making a charge for it almost worked once, too. Forged documents were probably the most frequent means, although one bounder, who couldn't afford forgeries, started dating a West German woman who looked like his fiancee. He took her to East Berlin one day, slipped away with her papers, and brought his fiancee back. Others came across through tunnels, inside a welding machine, inside a roll of wire, inside a radio, hidden in cars (you have to reinforce the springs; the border guards are alert to low riding cars) including an Isetta (the only make of car the guards did not check carefully), via cables strung over the wall, in a homemade balloon (the largest ever fabricated in Europe), and inside a pair of suitcases in a luggage rack on a train. Some people impersonated Soviet officers. Someone else discovered that the membership pass to the West Berlin playboy club looked like a diplomatic passport. One person took the windsheild off an MG and drove under the turnstiles at the crossing. Another build an ultra-light aircraft in his one-room apartment that could be disassembled and carried inside a Trabant (the much maligned East German automobile). One man brought his girlfriend across inside the bucket seat of his car. The flight home was eventful. We arrived in Paris during the third of the five windstorms that lashed England and Western Europe in a four-week period this winter. (I managed to be landing in a plane during two of them and crossing the Channel during another.) It was the first time I've been truly scared in an airplane. We were rerouted from DeGaulle to Orly, and once we landed, it seemed like we were still in the air, the plane was moving around so much. We sat on the runway for 45 minutes, until a bus came to get us. Then the crew passed us from hand to hand down the boarding stairs. I waited another 2 and a half hours in the terminal for my luggage to be unloaded. During that time, I managed to be in the basement of the terminal trying to buy a magazine when all the power went out. I also was at the far end of the terminal from bagging claim, looking for a free phone, when the police came an erected a barricade between me and the rest of the terminal. The roof was falling through the ceiling in places, so I had to go outside to get around. When I got to INRIA on Monday, I noticed that the red stripe in the French flag had frayed down to about 1/2 the width of the white and blue bands. The windstorms have done a lot of damage to trees here. After each storm, there were new trees down in the forest behind INRIA where I run. Versailles lost 600 trees in one of the storms, and there have been over 170 lives lost in Europe during the five storms.