Ich bin kein Berliner

In accordance with my newly-ratified policy on foreign travel, I checked in at the youth hostel on arrival in Göttingen, then headed out into the nearby woods to go hiking.

The newly-ratified policy has developed gradually over the last few months, starting when I realised on one of my weekend trips that despite my continuing Europe-seeing excitement, I was starting to have gorgeous-old-building-ennui. It's just not possible to keep finding everything wonderful for six straight months, especially when you're as ignorant of historical and technical details as I am. So, to properly enjoy my last week of travels, I've issued to myself the following proclamation:

• first, that I'm here to enjoy myself, and needn't Make The Most Of Every Moment or see uncongenial sights -- so I can go on pretty but insignificant backhill hikes, curl up early at night with a novel, and avoid Museums of Natural History without guilt
  
• second, that I'm here to educate myself -- so I can follow what Lonely Planet calls "the lemming routine" without shame, and go on tours or take the audioguide rather than always relying on imagination or intuition or independent thought

When I go home, I promise I'll never again sneer at tourists who are clueless or ignorant or can't speak the language. Really, perhaps it's best to go travelling to a place of which you know absolutely nothing beforehand. At any rate your net gain in knowledge is certainly thereby maximised.

Anway, the policy's working well. The hills in Göttingen are very nice -- gently sloping, and with mini-farms on the nearer edges rented by eco-keen city-slickers -- and the old earth fortifications round the town, where I wandered later that night, are pretty cool. I got home, and went to bed, and slept for a very long time.


The next day, yesterday, I took the train to Berlin, where I've been since. It's exciting; it really does feel like a big city; but it feels drab enough that I wouldn't want to live here. Perhaps it's inevitable for a town famous for wars and workaholic princes, totalitarianism and techno. I don't know. Maybe it's just the winter rain.

It's very good for me, though. I've seen a dozen classes of German schoolchildren, presumably on educational trips to the capital. I feel exactly the same. And really, after five months of bluffing my way through conversations with Germans on history and politics (which happen often, because Germans really like talking about history and politics), I'm grateful for an excuse to find out things like what the German parliament does, how so many Jews ended up in Germany, why the Berlin Wall was put up in the first place. I'm particularly ignorant of the Cold War -- I suspect, somehow, that this is standard for New Zealanders my age -- and it's been nice filling in whole "here be dragons" segments of my mental historical map.


My mathematical tour of Europe continues. In Göttingen -- whose main, perhaps only, claim to fame is as the home of a university that for a long time housed all the best mathematicians in Europe -- I saw a plaque to Riemann's former lodgements, in a boxy apartment overhanging a cut-price clothing store. Later I made a little pilgrimage out to the grave of Carl Friedrich Gauss. In Berlin this afternoon, in a spectacular Hohenzollern palace, I saw a picture of Bessel. He was labelled as an astronomer, and carrying a clock. Clearly the assumption that mathematicians are "er, those guys that deal with numbers" is of very long standing.

For a final news-tidbit -- I, too, have a hat! It was sourced on the weekend in a secondhand shop in the Freiburg old town. It's tweed and buckety, a little silly-looking . . . but of course nonetheless rather fetching.