Over a few beers …

Last night I met Rainer Erlinger, who writes an ethics column for Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung. He’s a lawyer and a doctor who still practices in both fields. He says his real fun is writing the ethics column for the past five years. We talked about column writing and blogging, and he’s amazed at how popular blogging is in the U.S., compared to Germany. A friend of his is an urban planning student, whose goal is to create public spaces that encourage people to meet one another. That goal ties in nicely with Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge, where the goal is to use digital news and information to bring people together in a geographic area. So, I realized there’s another discipline from which we can recruit News Challenge applicants.

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Pics from another day of walking around

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Day One in Berlin

Walking around Berlin

Click here for some photos of my first day in Berlin, including the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedaechtnis Kirche

How to seem intelligent in another country (i.e., how to fool them)

It takes a vocabulary of about 100 words — which is about what’s left of my college German. All you need to do is nod and smile at the right times and ever so rarely throw in one word, like “bestimmt” (definitely). The people you’re talking to might think you’re the deep, quiet kind. The hard part is trying to follow the conversation well enough so that you don’t really screw up your one word. In trying to say I liked the restaurant in this neighborhood (die Naehe), I think I said I like my toe (die Zehe).