Helen FieldsScience Writer

One of the manz interesting things about living in foreign countries is adapting to new computer kezboards. Iäm tzping on mz work computer right now. Have zou guessed which two kezs are switched on a German kezboard? Thatäs right, itäs Y and Z. Also, the ä is where the ’ should be and the ö is where the ; should be and I donät even remember what should be here: ü.

These differences make sense. German uses a lot more of the last letter of the alphabet than English does, so it makes sense to put it in a place thatäs easier to hit. (And Germans have much less reason to use the secondßtoßlast letter.) (See what happened to the hzphen?) And of course, zou want the ö, ä, and ü right where zou can find them.

Donät worrz, after a month on German kezboards, I actuallz am capable of tzping on them without making too manz mistakes. For one thing, a colleague at Bild showed me how to switch the kezboard to the American lazout. And also, if I slow down and think a bit, I can hit the z when I want the y and vice versa. I even know where to find all the punctuation marks I use in dailz life.

But this is a blog. Who slows down and thinks on a blog_ (Um, that sentence is supposed to end with a question mark, just so zou know.)

For today’s paper, I wrote about late blight – you may know it better as potato blight, the disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine. It’s still a huge problem for potato and tomato farmers, so a bunch of scientists sequenced its genome (their paper is in Nature today). Here’s my story.

Usually when I read about some new genome sequence, I get a big “eh” feeling. As in, “eh, big string of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts, who cares.” But this is a really cool disease, and super important economically, and it turns out the genome itself is interesting, too.

The organism that causes late blight has a ginormous genome, with a ton of repeating sequences of DNA. Those big repeaty areas include lots of copies of the nasty genes that help it attack plants, like genes that cause cell death and stuff. So maybe there’s some way that the bug is using those extra copies to overcome the plants’ defenses. Cool, huh?

Chad Nussbaum, the guy at the Broad Institute whose group did the sequencing, said this genome was really hard because of all the repeats – and it helped them figure out stuff they can use later. “Every genome teaches you something new,” he told me. “They’re all strange in their own little ways.”

Best thing I found while working on this story: PotatoPro, a news source for the potato processing industry with headlines like “Sultry Sally has re-launched its low fat potato chip with even less fat” and “Man dies after falling into potato harvester.”

This weekend I discovered my perfect German audience: three-year-old girls. I was reading a book to the daughter of a friend of a friend about some animals putting on a show. I didn’t quite get the pronunciation of the word for “stage” right, and she corrected me. With my deft foreign-language punning skills, I launched into a discussion of whether we were having stages or beans (they kind of sound alike) for dinner. It was clearly the funniest thing she had heard all day. Possibly in her whole life.

I also had a nice long chat about dinosaurs with a five-year-old boy. I didn’t catch all of it, but I did learn that they were bigger than a car. Best thing about talking to kids: they don’t get embarrassed when you mangle a sentence so badly that it’s unintelligible. They say “What?” so you know to try again.

So, as long as I don’t have to talk to or write for anyone over the age of six, I think I’m ok.

Here’s the story I was talking about yesterday. Yeah, it’s in German. Google Translator actually does a pretty good job with it – select German to English, paste the URL in the box, and it’ll show you the page in English.

Extra fun – you can scroll down and read the comments. Ah, newspaper comment sections. They’re juvenile and abusive everywhere in the world. Actually, most of these are kinda funny, and only one person swore he’s deleting the link from his computer and never reading Die Welt again. He was apparently upset that this “revolution and milestone in the research” did not get the appreciation it deserves.

Yeah…I’m not sure “revolution” and “milestone” are the right words for this study. I’d classify it as “pretty neat.” The whole idea of building telescopes in Antarctica is totally awesome, but it’s not new. This is just one more suggestion about a good place to put them.

Today I wrote my first story in German! Ok, actually my second story in German. I wrote a little tiny story last week at Bild, but something went tragically wrong and it didn’t get published. But today’s story went into a layout and went to the presses and will be in newspapers tomorrow! Real live newspapers! Which, apparently, people in Germany still read.

The edit went a lot better than you’d think, considering German is not my best language. It’s not even in my top three. In the first go-round, the editor corrected my grammar (which wasn’t *too* bad, but I’d guessed some genders wrong and messed up some cases) and fixed the two or three expressions that made no sense. I made the corrections, and then he went through and did an edit that was a bit more rewritey while I watched over his shoulder and suggested alternate phrasings and the intern at the next desk looked up words on Leo. In the final version, I still know what all the words mean, and it still ends with something funny I thought up. (My other funny was cut for space. Sigh.)

The editor and I bonded over our mutual love of the letter ß. It was taken out of a lot of German words in the spelling reform of 1996, presumably because it’s weird and people who don’t speak German don’t know what to do when it shows up in a text. It’s called the “eszett” and it makes an “s” sound. I’d used it to write the word “daß,” because cmon, there’s a ß key right on my keyboard, and that’s how I learned to spell “daß” in 1990, and besides, I love that letter. But the spellcheck on his computer caught it and he replaced it with “ss,” and we had a little grumble about it.

The people at Die Welt still seem to think I speak German. I suspect that I actually speak a unique hybrid of German, Norwegian, and German-accented English. But they keep speaking German to me, so I keep speaking my mishmash, and everyone seems happy.

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.