East and West

After less than a full day in Berlin my name has ended up in the pages of Germany's biggest magazine, Der Spiegel. I can assure my Russian friends that I was not run over by a horse. Here is what happened. Tonie's boyfriend is a professor, whose article was to be published in the magazine. The publishers required a photo of him, and he did not have one handy, so I volunteered to use my digital camera. The magazine wanted to have a byline for the photo, and that is how I came to be a footnote.

The day after my arrival to Berlin was spent sightseeing and preparing for the multi-day bike trip on which Tonie and I departed the next morning. We criss-crossed the town a couple of times, staying mostly to the east of the old dividing line. The pavement on streets that used to form a border between East and West bears markings of the wall's former location. Pedestrian crosswalk lights also help determine where you are in relation to the line. The funny green silhouette of a man crossing the street has actually become a sort of symbol of Eastern identity, since crosswalks in the West lack this personality.

I spent some time in Potsdamerplatz, not so much for its historical symbolism as a former center that turned into no-man's-land when the wall went up, but rather for a more prosaic reason. It turned out that the nearby Sony Center building had free and fast wireless internet access and so I was able to surf the net and send emails directly from my handheld for the first time in Europe. I had made a couple of attempts in Barcelona, but the access points were either too expensive or difficult to find.