Helen FieldsScience Writer

I’m cleaning off the bulletin board by my desk and came across a couple of blog ideas I’d meant to write a while ago, so here’s one of them. I’ve now been back from Berlin for almost four months, but I don’t think it’s too late to tell you the things I most appreciated when I got home in October 2009.

1. The walk lights in D.C. count down how much time you have left to get across the street. This is handy.

2. Water fountains! I saw one water fountain the whole time I was in Germany. It was in Hamburg, by the harbor, and it was on this giant pedestal that said “water” in big letters and multiple languages. I guess they were worried people wouldn’t recognize it. In German, they even pointed out that it was drinking water.

3. Joking with strangers. My language skills weren’t up to it. I mean, not that I go around making wisecracks all day here, but every now and then, you just want to be able to say something funny and have someone appreciate it.

4. Walls without graffiti. It seemed like everything that stood still for more than a few minutes in Berlin got tagged. I’m sure this is not actually true – ok, I occasionally stood still for a few minutes and no one approached me with spray paint – but really, there is graffiti everywhere. Some of it is cool murals and artsy stuff and whatnot, but a lot of it is just ugly old tagging.

5. Tap water!! In restaurants!!! I’m sorry, that wasn’t enough exclamation points to express how awesome this is!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!! !

(Previously: Good things from Berlin that stuck with me – and, I can report a few months later, have continued to do so.)

I never got around to writing about a lot of my adventures in Germany, partly because I was having trouble uploading pictures to Wordpress. So, I guess you’re in luck, ’cause I figured that out.

When my parents came and visited at the end of my stay, we took a week and went down to poke around Bavaria. Our first stop was Berchtesgaden, a lovely alpine resort town and one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite places. For his 50th birthday, the Nazis built a mountain retreat for him on a crag with 360-degree views. Hitler, according to my guidebook, had vertigo and hated it there.

The building survived – unusual for Nazi sites – and is now a major tourist destination. Buses run up the winding road all day, and there’s a restaurant up top.

The day we went up it was super cloudy and you couldn’t see the views. My dad and I went on a little hike on a trail that climbed up and down the rocks and wound around, with what should have been fantastic views of the alps.

It felt exactly like the beginning of the second Lord of the Rings movie, when Frodo and Sam are trying to find their way through the rocks of Emyn Muil. Spooky.

I’m really happy to be home, but I’ve also been pleased to notice some ways that my life in Germany is sticking with me.

For example: I went to the grocery store the other day and was surprised to remember they actually give you bags here. In Germany (and in Norway, and heck, maybe in most of Europe), if you want a bag, you have to pay for it. So of course I always carried reusable bags, and so far I’m doing that here, too. I have a giant collection. Might as well put them to use. Although I don’t know what I’m going to put my recycling in when I run out of paper bags from Trader Joe’s.

On Sunday I was reading up on parking near an event I was going to when I realized, geez, it’s only two miles away, I wouldn’t have thought twice about walking that distance in Berlin. Ok, I actually would have thought twice, because two miles is far. Also, unlike this neighborhood, Berlin is flat. But I walked the two miles over hill and dale and arrived feeling virtuous. I mean, that’s three good acts in one, right? Prevented pollution, got exercise, saved money by not using my car. Oh, and saved parking for others. Four! Four good things! So my new criteria: if it’s less than two miles, why not walk? Tonight I walked to the library (two miles, then took the metro home) and yesterday I walked to Safeway (less than a mile, and now I’m embarrassed that I usually drive it).

Now if only I could convince the water in my apartment to run hot instantly like the water in my Berlin apartment, I’d be in business.

After a very long time on an airplane, a much-longer-than-planned time at the Newark airport, and a very short time on another airplane, I am home from Berlin! Hooray! Now I have to think of something to do on my blog other than make mildly amusing observations about the German workplace.

Wednesday afternoon I was reading a book on a bench by the canal, waiting for my neighbor to get back from the playground with his kids so I could get back into my apartment. And this guy came over and asked me if I could take a picture, because the self-timer on their camera was broken. I mean, what else was I doing, right? Sure, I can push a camera button.

So the guy (Andreas) and his friend (Peter) told me they were recreating the cover art from Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits. They’d already taken the picture on the back cover, of Simon and Garfunkel in front of a chain link fence, and they’d been trying and trying to get the front cover one right. They were dressed like them and everything, in jackets from the thrift store with the tags still on. (Before every series of pictures they had to grab the tags and hide them again.)

Why were they doing this? Yes, that was my question, too. It turns out they’re artists, and the photos are for the covers of the catalog for an exhibit they’re doing in Munich later this year. The project: They wrote a song for each of five shopping malls around Berlin, then performed the songs at the malls, while videoing their performances and their interactions with security and whatnot.

I feel like this is the kind of experience you come to Berlin to have: helping random strangers create the exhibition catalog about their run-ins with mall cops. So it’s a good thing they found me, two days before I leave town. They were super nice and we had a half-hour or so photo shoot by the canal.

I really hope they use one of my pictures. They said they’ll send me a copy of the catalog, which is, of course, a songbook. Sing-along party at my house!

So, I’m sitting here at my desk at Die Welt a few minutes ago and my neighbor’s phone rings. This happens often. But then I notice that she’s leaning over, looking at my phone, and reading off my phone number. She hung up and told me it was a secretary, and shrugged – she didn’t know what it was about.

The secretary calls and says, “Frau Fields? Do you speak German?” And I said, “More or less.” She said, “I have a reader on the line, I’ll transfer you.” And I was like, uhh, uhh, and there he was. Yesterday the 19-year-old intern and I co-wrote a story about chronic kidney disease and kidney failure. (Really, it was mostly her – she’s young, but she’s good. Also, she speaks German and can interview people.)

The nice man told me he’d read my article in today’s paper about kidney disease, and I’d mentioned a test to detect protein in the urine. Well, yesterday his wife had a blood test at the hospital, and he had the test results, and could I tell him what the line about protein meant?

Uhhhhh….no. No, I could not tell him that. We chatted a bit about tests for kidney function, agreed that it was best to talk to the doctor (he relayed this to his wife) and he thanked me for such an informative article and told me to keep up the good work.

I pretty much feel like now I am a German superstar, although I didn’t understand everything he said, I stumbled a bit while talking, and, yeah, I totally couldn’t answer his question. Man, I haven’t gotten a call from a reader in forever. It’s the last day of my fellowship – not a bad way to end.

You know the rules in elevators. You get in, you push the button, you turn and face the front, you watch the numbers. There is no eye contact. There is no chit-chat.

In Germany, they have DIFFERENT RULES. You say hello to the strangers – STRANGERS! – when you get on the elevator. You say goodbye when you get off. Sometimes you even face the middle of the elevator instead of the door.

The elevator at work is pretty much the most confusing social encounter of my day. Do I really have to say “bye” when I get off at the 12th floor? Please, let the people on this elevator all work on lower floors so they leave before me and I don’t have to initiate any greetings.

And it’s not just because we all work at the same company – I stayed in a hotel for three days in August and other guests said hello when they got on the elevator down to breakfast.

Is this true in other parts of the world? I don’t remember people being chatty in elevators in Japan. The main thing I remember about elevators in Japan was that in the elevator in the building where my dad worked, the door took forever to close if you didn’t push the close door button, so elevator etiquette was to push the button as you left the elevator. The area around that one button was totally worn from all the fingers.

Fascinating German fact of the day: the word for “birth control pill” is apparently Antibabypille. Well, it’s descriptive, isn’t it? I’m reading an article in Die Welt about a woman who was taking birth control pills and died of a pulmonary embolism – which is the much more straightforward Lungenembolie. (It’s an embolism…in your lungs!)

This weekend the Burns Fellows had our official almost-end-of-fellowship meeting in Munich (or, if you prefer, München). There’s this little festival you may have heard of in Munich. Happens once a year? Lots of beer and lederhosen? Yeah, Oktoberfest, that’s right. It started on Saturday. Many of my smart friends have pointed out that it’s actually September, so here you go, fact of the day: Oktoberfest always runs for 16 days and ends on the first Sunday in October, so the latest it’s ever going to go is October 7, and it can start as early as mid-September.

Oktoberfest is the kind of thing I should hate. I don’t like beer. I really, really don’t like cigarette smoke. Loud boisterous rooms aren’t really my scene. And it was really hot in there.

But, holy cow, it was fun. Soon after we got to the Augustiner beer tent and ingratiated ourselves with a partly-full table of Swedes and Germans (you have to have a table or you can’t order beer), the band started playing, and we learned that what you actually do at Oktoberfest is dance on benches. That’s it. That’s the whole activity. Wave your one-liter mug of beer and dance on benches and sing along with the band. Note that you do not dance on tables. You’re not supposed to step on the tables. Everybody just stands on the benches. It’s easier than standing on the floor, really. (This may vary in other tents at other times. But in that tent on Saturday evening, it was all about the bench-dancing.)

I would totally go again. Heck, I have a dirndl now, I have to find another occasion to wear it.

Sorry the picture’s shaky. Blame one of my new Swedish friends.

For today’s Welt I wrote about colorblind monkeys – scientists cured them of their colorblindness with gene therapy. “Cured” is kind of a silly word in this case. The males of this species naturally don’t see red and green, so it’s not like they have something wrong with them that needs to be fixed. So, more accurately: Scientists gave monkeys a gene for a pigment they didn’t have, and now the little guys see colors like we do.

Aww, lookit the cute li’l monkey doing the test! He’s supposed to find the pink dots among the gray dots. If he gets it right he gets a drop of grape juice.

The monkeys in the study are squirrel monkeys. Isn’t that a cute name? It sounds tiny and adorable, and like it would enjoy hopping around in trees, which I think is a fairly accurate description of the species. So, guess what the German word for them is? Totenkopfaffen. Death’s-head monkey. Yipe.

Progress update: I actually wrote this story in German, rather than writing in English and translating. And it ran in TWO newspapers today. Woo. I’ve mostly written for Die Welt so far, but the science section also supplies stories for Welt am Sonntag (the Sunday edition)  and Berliner Morgenpost. 

Photo Credit: Neitz Laboratory