Karin tells a great story about overhearing some well-dressed, polite man dealing with a rude clerk.
“Were you born to be this rude,” he asked, “or did they send you to school to learn how?”
In previous trips to Germany, we'd run into lots of rude, unsmiling, and unhelpful people, but not so much this time. It did help to have our native tongue talker with us, but as she said, Berliners are known to be more open and funny than people in other parts of the country.
The little town of Marburg and the inn we stayed at there could not have been more pleasant, and the same was generally true of Berlin. The latter is bursting with energy, young people, and money. Yes, some of the older buildings need cleaning and repair (unlike St. Petersburg, where Putin spent a billion euros a few years ago polishing them ahead of a G8 meeting), but almost all of the City is new. The buses and subways all run pretty much on time except when they're closed for a marathon, and there's so much to do. We wish we were fifty years younger.
A recent op ed piece in the New York Times suggested that Germans resent having to bail out their southern neighbors such as Greece in part out of envy. They'd like to enjoy life too, but have to work too hard to earn the free time to do it. At least in Berlin, some of them seem to have stuck a good balance.
In St. Petersburg, we saw a begger sitting on the street with a cup in front of him. His face was deeply wrinkled with a lifetime of care and grief, and he had a long beard, making him look like late pictures of Tolstoy. In Berlin, we saw a similar beggar, but this one was young, and he was busily rolling a joint.
