I got an idear!

I just got back from London, Paris, and Berlin. It was a business trip, and rightly so, I spent the vast majority of my time working. The first two days were in Berlin. I left the San Jose office at 11am and arrived at the Berlin office at 2pm the next day. The commute to work involved two days, two planes, and about two hours of sleep. Tuesday and Wednesday at the office entailed many small rooms with big white boards and pleasantly intoxicating marker fumes. But work aside, I did manage to learn a couple of things about the German culture.

In fact, the learning began even before I left California. I sent an email to the car company to tell them that I was joining the trip, and that they should be prepared to shuttle four people instead of three to and from the airport, office, and hotel. I signed my mail “Thanks, Monifa” and within a few minutes (so prompt, the Germans) I received a reply, “You’re welcome, Monifer.”

Interesting.

On our first night in Berlin our Deutsche colleagues took us out for traditional German fare at a lovely restaurant, Lutter & Wegner. I looked at the menu and immediately concluded that I was going to need to suspend my meat-free food guidelines for a few days. Steamed veggies simply weren’t to cut it. I ordered the Vienna Schnitzel and a heifeweissen. Vienna Schitzel. Vienna. I always thought that it was wienerschnitzel and that it was some sort of German sausage. Turns out that any schnitzel is breaded fried meat and this particular one is a pork cutlet served in a traditional Austrian style. So that explains it. That’s why the kid on Silver Spoons, little Ricky Schroder, would inevitably burst onto the set each episode and exclaim, “Hey! I got an idear!” Schroder. It’s a German thing. Now I understand.

We didn’t have much time for tourism in Berlin. On our last evening we took a short walk to Checkpoint Charlie. The wall came down in 1989, but the food on the other side continues to suck. I had a salami cheese and mushroom pizza that was the envy of the rest of the table—they were suffering through soggy broccoli and low grade steaks. Thankfully, I was in my bed by 10pm. I was already severely sleep deprived by this point—jet lag and the furious pace at the office left little time for sleeping. My circadian rhythms refused to shift to the zeit of the reich. I had a 5:15am wakeup call, but my eyes popped open at 2:15 am (5:15 pm Cali time.) When the car service picked us up at 5:45 am for our flight to Paris, I was surly and confused.