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.)

At the time I left for Germany last July, I owned three German dictionaries. One I got in 1990 when I took my first German class, one random paperback of unknown provenance, and a big desk dictionary I got a few years ago when I was taking another German class and learning big words. And I had access to another – my dad has a tiny pocket one from, oh, probably the 1960s or so.

Any of these would have been excellent choices to take along. So which of these dictionaries did I take with me for two months in a country where I only kind of speak the language and might benefit from having a dictionary to help me learn new vocabulary?

None of them. That’s right. Not one. I think I figured I would just use the online dictionary Leo. Because my fantasy version of Berlin apparently has free wi-fi raining from the sky and little elf helpers who walk around carrying your computer for you.

I got to Germany and quickly realized how dumb I was. Leo was indeed handy at home and at work, but was no darn use at any of the other places I might see or hear German words, like on billboards or in a biergarten or in a book I was reading on the bus. I could have paid for a data plan and used the mobile phone version of Leo, but…it was a lot cheaper to buy a new dictionary. Besides, I clearly don’t own enough dictionaries already.

Berlin is pretty much drowning in foreigners, so the big bookstore I went to had a large English section. Two of the many German-English dictionaries were pocket-sized: a Langenscheidt and an Oxford. (Actual pocket, not Oxford “pocket.”) I picked up the Langenscheidt and opened it to the last page of the K’s. The last entry was “KZ nt <-s, -s> abbr –> Konzentrationslager HIST concentration camp.” That was not an abbreviation I knew, and it seemed useful. I checked the Oxford. It didn’t have KZ, and my mind was made up.

A few weeks later, I took the dictionary along to a concentration camp. Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin, opened on July 12, 1936. In the beginning it mostly held political prisoners and criminals; later, that expanded to include Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others, many of whom were deported east to concentration camps or extermination camps in Poland. (Map.) Until I started visiting these places, I didn’t realize there was a difference between concentration camps and extermination camps. People died in concentration camps. There were executions, epidemics, medical experiments, starvation, torture. Countless prisoners were worked to death in factories. But the extermination camps like Treblinka and Belzec and Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau were different. They were just for killing. (Auschwitz was actually a network of almost 50 camps; Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, had the big gas chambers.)

After the war, Sachsenhausen was in the Soviet occupation zone, and eventually East Germany. The Soviets kept political prisoners there until 1950. Later in the 50s, it was turned into a museum, but with a decidedly communist point of view. A larger-than-life memorial sculpture shows a Red Army soldier standing in solidarity with two prisoners he’s just freed. During the time when the countries were separate, this area was used as a backdrop for rallies. The East German government positioned itself as the true enemy of Nazis. They called the Berlin Wall the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall.” Keeping those nasty West German fascists out, you see. A concentration camp must have seemed like a good place to talk about how much better they were than the other side.

Dictionary Stats: Langenscheidt Universal German Dictionary

date: 2002
publisher: Langenscheidt
length: 608 pages
dimensions: 4½ by 3¼ by 1¼ inches. Still kind of big for most pockets, but perfect for the purse.
guide words on pp. 196-197: Preiselbeere f cranberry; Pulverschnee m powder snow
obscenities: Yes! Interesting – the other Langenscheidt dictionary I’ve written about, this one, didn’t.  My mother asked why I include this in the dictionary stats, so here’s the reason: I think it’s interesting to see whether or not editors include “bad words.” Is the dictionary reflecting the full range of the language as spoken?

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.

One of my favorite online dictionaries, Leo, is this week’s Dictionary of the Week. Actually, it’s kind of last week’s Dictionary of the Week. Hey. I was busy.

Yep, the online dictionary gets an unattractive picture of my computer screen. Sorry, Leo.

One of the many problems with having a job is that you don’t always have your dictionaries with you. In my last two office jobs, I usually had a red English dictionary, a medical dictionary, and a few usage guides at my desk. So if I had to look something up in a foreign language, I was stuck with the internet. (Yes, I could have visited the library, but this is the internet age, my friend.)

My general verdict on online dictionaries: I don’t like ‘em. Take Norwegian, for example. This one gives the impression that it exists solely as a vehicle for ads and this one doesn’t have the word “funky.” Actually, neither has the word “funky.”

Now look what happens when you type “funky” into Leo. Not only do you get five possible ways to say “funky” in German, you also get “to dance the funky chicken” (den Ententanz tanzen) (literally: to dance the duck dance). Then farther down on the page there’s a list of links to forums, with discussion topics like “Deutsche Übersetzung gesucht ‘Funky cold Medina’” (”looking for a German translation of ‘Funky Cold Medina’”).

One of my classmates told me about Leo when I was taking a brush-up German class at the Goethe-Institut Washington early last year. He worked for a German architecture firm, so he had a somewhat more urgent need to look up German words than I did. It’s only useful when you’re sitting at a computer, and I always did my homework for that class on the metro.

But when I went to Germany this fall to do a journalism fellowship, boy was I happy to have Leo. I always had it open on my computer – to help me read the morning paper, to translate words into German when I was writing, for looking up words I heard people say or whatever. My colleagues all used it, too. They were covering science, which meant they had to read a ton of journal articles and press releases and websites in English.

The main problem with Leo is that there are so many entries, sometimes you can’t figure out which is the most important. Take “finish.” It has several senses – the finish line, the finish on a piece of furniture; finishing a glass of water is different from finishing a project. When you look it up on Leo, they’re split up by part of speech, but other than that, they’re all listed in alphabetical order.

The advantage of a dictionary on paper: it prioritizes. But you can’t beat Leo for speed.

Dictionary Stats: LEO Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch

date: constantly updating
publisher: LEO GmbH
length: 586,592 entries
special feature: Advent calendar. Of German poetry. Enjoy.
other languages: Leo also has Deutsch-Französisch, Deutsch-Spanisch, Deutsch-Italienisch, and Deutsch-Chinesisch editions.
news: Leo has added a new set of economic terms. “We hope that definitions of terms such as Gläubigerausschuss or Steuerausweichung will prove valuable for many of our users – including native German speakers.”
obscenities: Wow. Yes. So many obscenities. In so many combinations and forms.

After I found out I was going to Berlin, I found out U2 was touring this year. And I was like, oh, great. I bet they play Berlin when I’m in D.C. and D.C. when I’m in Berlin. But I held out hope, you know? What are the chances they’d be exactly wrong? But indeed, they played Berlin about a week before I got there, and played D.C. about a week before I came home.

This wasn’t all bad, because it meant I went to the Southwest last week to see them on the best vacation ever.

But now Kate points out: They’ve done it again! They’re playing a free concert at the Brandenburg Gate in November! Hello! Guys! I’m IN THE U.S.A. now. Could we please work this out in the future?

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.