The world smiles with you

I eat my words. Or possibly my hat. Berlin's a much nicer place, in sunshine, than I gave it credit for. It has lots of glassy shiny colourful buildings, and it's that rare thing, a big city that's managed to create open spaces without having them look as if they were bulldozed clear yesterday in preparation for a parking lot to be built tomorrow. I slept in late this morning, then went undirectedly wandering, and saw all this and more.

It also has lots of neo-classical Victorian official buildings with svelte nymph-columns and Latin inscriptions along the lines of "Erected by King Frederick to the honour of Apollo and the Nine Muses". Berlin's the capital of the former Kingdom of Prussia, which meandered along in backwater obscurity for hundreds of years before becoming big in the eighteenth century. So its building burst was late compared to most German cities. Most oldey-buildings are erbaut 17- or 18-something, by the time when mischmasches of ancient religions were retro or appropriately regal rather than blasphemous.

Everywhere in Berlin -- particularly the centre of the former East Berlin -- is under construction. Some of the construction defies belief -- they want to build a new main-Berlin-Palace! To mimic the glorious old eighteenth-century one! Which was bulldozed by the DDR fifty years ago while perfectly intact to make space for some sort of government building, which was itself bulldozed a few years ago to erase all memory of the deed! And they're repainting the inside of the Marienkirche (the oldest still-used church in Berlin)! but when I was there today, the whitewashed-but-unpainted walls were being rehung with pictures! I don't understand much, but the sheer energy's nice.

I forgot to mention that yesterday I went to inspect our men in Berlin, otherwise known as the New Zealand Embassy. It's a carpeted office on the third floor of an office building somewhere south of the centre. It's staffed largely by enthusiastic Germans, it has two pictures of Helen Clark on the wall, it has multi-month-old North and Souths and a view out to Checkpoint Charlie. And I went to see the archaeological remnants of Troy, dug up in Turkey a hundred years ago by a German businessman and smuggled to Berlin before their discovery was announced. This was clearly either the source of, or a successful application of, the principle that possession is the fastest nine-tenths of the law. Troy consisted mostly of clay pots, it seems. Now we know what was in Helen's dowry.

To Nuremberg this afternoon, and Munich tomorrow.