Helen FieldsScience Writer

Today was my first day at the new workplace, Die Welt. (”The World.”) It’s got the same publisher as Bild but is somewhat higher-brow. For example, there are no naked ladies on the cover and very few exclamation points in the stories.

I wasn’t optimistic about my first day – I’d never managed to reach my official contact before starting, and when I reached a secretary on Friday, she appeared to be mad at me – but it went really well. I already have an assignment for tomorrow. And it’s for a story I proposed myself. At a meeting. IN GERMAN.

I showed up in the morning and spoke German and somehow they took this to mean that I actually speak German, rather than just being able to fake it in brief, uncomplicated encounters, and they keep speaking it to me. (And repeating themselves more slowly and with simpler vocabulary when I’m confused, bless their hearts.)

I’m afraid the editor thinks I am also writing my story in German. My written German is like that of a five-year-old who has only learned one or two sentence structures and has a severely limited vocabulary and was probably also raised by wolves (see example of corrections here). Of course, everyone here reads English perfectly well and I’m sure I’ll be able to get translation help if I need it. But it’s for Wednesday’s paper. So they’d better help fast.

Wish me luck.

My mother forwarded me a link today to a New York Times story about Tatort, a German police drama that’s been running since 1970. 1970! Almost 40 years! My parents watch the Cologne version at home, with subtitles, but I now know – thank you, NYT – that they produce versions of it all over the country, it’s on every Sunday evening, and by not watching it, I am clearly missing out on something BIG. Don’t worry; it’s on my calendar for the rest of the time I’m here.

UPDATE (8/28): My mom points out that the link originally came from her friend Judy.

Definitely the most exciting thing to happen all week: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid a visit to Bild. Last year the original blueprints for the buildings at Auschwitz turned up in Berlin and ended up in Bild’s hands; today the editor-in-chief presented them to Netanyahu for Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel.

We knew a day ahead of time that the roads around the office would be closed, so I wasn’t surprised when my bus driver announced that he was going to be taking a different route and now would be a good time to get off. I walked the last 10 minutes to work and counted 27 police vehicles at my regular bus stop. Which was by no means the only place that police vehicles were parked. I would’ve taken some police car pictures, but I don’t know how jumpy Berlin cops are about photos, and I didn’t think the best way to find out was by photographing the security measures for an Israeli state visit.

My office is in that giant building at right.

The room I’ve been in the last two weeks looks right down on the main entrance. The action started at about 10 a.m., when a tour bus pulled up and popped out a dozen or two photographers. We amused ourselves for much of the next hour by watching the snipers (the most obvious ones were right in front of the entrance, sitting on top of a VW van) and placing bets on which direction he’d come from (I won).

See all those people looking out the window? I wasn’t kidding when I said it was the most exciting thing to happen all week.

Finally, the reward: a big honkin’ motorcade. I mean, I live in a world capital. I know my motorcades. This was a big motorcade. Twenty-five cars at the very least, plus a full complement of motorcycles, some ambulances, and a helicopter, and it seemed like about 100 people pouring into the building.

This is a fraction of the many, many cars – and only part of the crowd that got out of the cars. Also, note the aforementioned snipers at right.

The prime minister and his ginormous entourage re-emerged 40 minutes later, and I actually managed to get a picture with him in it:

He’s the guy with the gray hair facing this way, next to the back passenger door of the limo. Cmon, you can totally recognize him.

So yeah. I may be from D.C. and all, but I still get excited about motorcades.

Germany seems like it should be a reasonably peaceful place. But when you work at a tabloid, you read about all sorts of unpleasant things.

A few days ago a guy allegedly murdered the mother of his baby and her parents with a sword. Last week an old man shot and killed three people. Some people found a murdered woman in a barrel the other day. Earlier this week a guy was sentenced to 10 years, 9 months in prison for something awful enough that I don’t really want to tell you about it.

So the U.S. doesn’t have the market entirely cornered on heinous violence.

In other news, this week is British Week on the cover of Bild – all the naked ladies are from the UK. Well, I say naked ladies, but they’re really only mostly naked. They always have a bikini bottom or something. And I learned an important vocabulary word: “Oben-ohne-Models.” It translates quite directly: topless models.

It’s a winning combination, crime and nudity. Also, celebrity news. I’ve even heard of some of the celebrities. Zac Efron, of all people, was on the last page of yesterday’s paper, as were Ginger Spice, Leonardo diCaprio, and “Prinz Andrew & Fergie.” But the lead story on the front page this morning was about…some German celebrity being pregnant with the baby of some other German celebrity.

To sum up: I’m actually really enjoying my little stint at the tabloid and still have my fingers crossed that I’ll be able to write a story for them before moving on to my other placement next week.

When the Washington National Opera wants to entertain the masses with the gift of free opera, it chooses Porgy and Bess or The Barber of Seville. (Coming up Sept 12.) Easy to follow, lovable. Catchy tunes. So what does the Staatsoper in Berlin offer for its free outdoor performance?

Tristan and Isolde. Yikes. I mean, I hope to be there, but…it’s hardly light entertainment. Well, not that Porgy and Bess is light. I cried at the simulcast on the Mall. But still, it’s got, you know, tunes.

When I’m enthusiastic about something, I tend to talk about it a lot. Earlier this year I kept posting links on Facebook to shoes I wanted from this company, whose shoes are cute, comfortable, and – oh yes – wildly expensive. I own a few pairs, because they’re sooo gooood. (Financial responsibility note: They were all on sale.)

This morning my friend Sarah was biking through my neighborhood in her early-morning haze when she saw ahead of her a pair of Fluevogs walking down the street. Wow! Fluevogs! in Berlin! She looked up, and it was me, wearing my new heels to work for the first time. Ha.

Ah, the classic evening meal of cheapskates in Berlin:

It’s a döner im Brot. It’s kind of a variation on a gyro – mystery meat shaved off a rotating hunk o’ broily goodness, stuffed in bread with sauce, slaw, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, and deliciousness. So much deliciousness. And if there’s not enough carbohydrates in the bread, you can add fries and a soda. Incidentally, Coke tastes so much better here, because it’s sweetened with sugar instead of corn syrup. Mmmm. Suuugarrrrr.

Anyway, this is actually the first döner I’ve had on this trip…and you can probably tell it’s in a mall food court. You’re supposed to buy them from sketchy stands. I’ll do better next time. I was in the mall! It was almost 7:00! I was hungry! I’m sorry! It won’t happen again!

The world championships in track & field were in Berlin last week. I kept forgetting to watch them on TV, so what I saw – the grand total – was the men’s high jump final, about five minutes of men’s racewalking when a TV was on at work, and a few minutes of women’s discus. I did keep seeing athletes wandering around town with their shiny passes around their necks, so that was exciting.

This kid is not a competitor. He’s on a runway set up by Puma in Alexanderplatz – he’s running past speed cameras that flash your kilometers per hour on a board. I think it would be a lot more interesting if they told you how fast you can run 100 meters. Note the Jamaica colors – and there’s even a little Jamaican bar/hut thing in the background, playing reggae.

Facebook sometimes has problems with gender – if it doesn’t know which a person is, it usually throws around “they,” as in “Bruce Fields took their turn in [game]!” because, yknow, English doesn’t really have a gender-neutral pronoun.

Look how much worse it is when you switch your Facebook language to German:

This is Facebook suggesting a friend who I might know. It doesn’t seem to know if Laura is female or not, so not only does it have the kind-of-neutral “FreundIn” (which means Freund/Freundin), it also has to suggest alternative endings for the article (could be ein or eine) and the adjective (could be gemeinsamer or gemeinsame). It obviously doesn’t know what to do with Carleton, either.

Whew! German is rough. Well, it’s rough in writing, when you can’t just mumble the adjective endings.

Part of the deal with this fellowship is that I’m also supposed to do my regular work. So, here it is: a news story about rice genetics. I know, it sounds boring, but it’s totally not! Modifying rice is a big deal – in 2005, 20 percent of the world’s calories came from rice, and production is going to have to increase to keep up with population growth. So this piece is about one cool new study on finding a gene that helps rice survive floods.

An interesting point about this work is how old-school it is. They’re looking for genes, but not using super-newfangled proteomics or whatever techniques – instead, they look for them by doing lots of mating plants together and looking for crossovers, like I learned about in intro biology in approximately 1994. Ok, yeah, computers do all the calculations now. But if they were teaching it in intro biology in 1994, believe me, it was basic.

Then when they find the gene, they don’t put it into another plant with viruses or fancy-schmancy genetic transformations – they do it with breeding. Sure, they use molecular techniques to make sure they’re getting the right genes in the offspring (this speeds things wayyyy up). But basically it’s good, old-fashioned plant sex.

Neat, huh? Made me want to learn more about the world of rice research.