Hope you are all well.  Various goings on over here…

 

I. Wuppertal, land of the upside-down monorail?

Sometimes you end up in a place odd enough to defy a complete logical explanation.  Wuppertal, Germany was such a place.  Seemingly famous only for its 100+ year old inverted monorail transport system (aka “Schwebebahn”) and a near tragic incident involving a marketing promotion, a monorail and, an elephant named “Tuffi” , Wuppertal was odd enough to merit a visit, and since I was asked to go give talk there, off I went one morning leaving Aachen on a train called the “Whupper-express” (really). 

Note: Those of you in Seattle dreaming of the public referendum mandated “Monorail expansion”, take note.  This whole scheme seems like it had weird built into it right from the start. If ground has not yet been broken on the “extend the Monorail project”, my vote goes for the inverted Schebebahn option…weird wins.   

In any case Wuppertal, while a pleasant enough place, was a bizarro-world version of Aachen.  Located at the other end of the “Wupper-express” line about an hour and a half away, it contained most of the same shops and cafes, but in a strange ex coal-mining region “city folded on top of it-self” and way; you have to see it in person to fully understand.  A bit scruffier, less organized (if you can apply that term to Germany) but not unwelcoming.  After my talk there I walked around town a bit and pondered the upside-down monorailness that clearly defines this burg.  

Should you find yourself someday in an odd town on the fringes of Düsseldorf called Wuppertal, do what I did…wander around for a few hours, stare at the upside-down monorail, ask people about the elephant named “Tuffi” and wonder “why and how?”.  Then get back on a train and go onto wherever you were planning on going.

II. Berlin.  Cheap, fun, gritty and happening.

Krista, a few of our friends and I decided to spend Easter tripping up in Berlin.  Nothing goes with pastel colored Easter eggs like late night techno and the cast of Sprockets. 

Berlin was terrific and has moved many notches up in my book.  Due to a housing glut from a post reunification building and renovation boom, Berlin is also quite affordable; both lodging and eating out are very reasonable in big European city terms.  Parts of the old East Berlin have turned into high-end retail, and other parts play the host a very funky NYC East Village scene.  West Berlin remains pleasant and well groomed.  The city also has a large amount of greenery in it, with parks everywhere.  There are still some odd remnants of old Soviet style “glory to the working proletariat” buildings standing to serve as a reminder that something truly unprecedented happened here over the course of about 50 years.  Whereas the western world experienced a descent during the 1970’s into “very ugly kitchen design madness” this same Leitmotif of architectural thinking seems to have dominated East German architecture for about 40 years, with the moral equivalent of “green linoleum kitchen floors” being applied to the entire design of building exteriors.  That said, there is a huge amount of both the very old and very new in building design to please the eye.  To walk around Berlin today is to be continually astounded that this city was ripped in half for dozens of years and then suddenly stitched back together in less than a decade.  It’s an absolutely fascinating place.

Berlin is also probably the most multicultural and international of Germany’s cities.  Were I planning on living in Germany long term, Berlin would probably be at the top of the list.

III. Antwerp, Belgium done right.

Having been down to Brussels many times this past year, the city has never really clicked with me.  With its street signs and metro stops in two languages (French and Flemish), it’s confusing to get around in, full of EU bureaucrats, and altogether doesn’t seem to fit into any coherent whole.  I may be missing something, but the city just doesn’t resonate for me.

Antwerp on the other hand was terrific!  Krista and I drove down there (2 hours from Aachen) to go to their jewelry markets to look for wedding rings and to check out the city as a whole.  We were both blown away by how fun and happening of a city it was.  Located on a river, and with a terrific looking old town and lots of outdoor cafes, Antwerp was friendly, happening and great fun to walk around in.  True to its geography was a terrific mix of both Amsterdam and Brussels.  So far, my favorite place in Belgium by a lot.  Definitely worth a visit!

IV. The economy, upcoming German elections & “you want some pie with that?”

It’s election season here in North Rhine Westphalia and political advertisements are up everywhere.  Given the overall state of the German economy (floundering), economic issues top the list of political concerns and news coverage.  With this you would expect bold new ideas, sharp differences in economic policy or at least intent for decisive action.  Amazingly this is not the case.  Tragicomically, this is not from a lack of understating; it’s widely acknowledged that “low labor liquidity/overly regulated business” is the key problem.  However the two main parties, the CDU (a few steps left of the US Democratic party) and SPD (a few steps left of the CDU) seem resolutely unable to make any bold statements explaining how things will be changed.  Boilerplate talk about the need for industry, government and workers to cooperate to bring about greater competitiveness seems to be the best that can be mustered.  More troubling is talk about the need for tax-harmonization across Europe (e.g. raise each countries taxes to a German or French level, to avoid lower tax countries from “unfairly” benefiting at the expense of heavier tax states), in essence it’s “it’s the other countries that are causing our problems” talk.  Watching it from the distance of non-citizenship makes it all look like a bizarre foreign film with subtitles you don’t quite understand. All of this leads the visiting resident to ponder “how on earth did you get here?” and to spin their own theories on cultural differences.

My theory…

The key difference seems to be one of a bounded vs. unbounded world view.  North Americans and Britons (the French would call the sum “those Atlanticists”) are, in relative terms, optimists.  They tend to view the world as “an expanding pie that we want to have a slice of.”  North Americans and Atlanticists view the economy as essentially unbounded in its potential for growth and tend to worry a bit less about how much of the “economic pie” someone else is getting since the whole thing is getting bigger anyway.  The common western European view however is one of a “fixed sized pie”, a “slowly growing pie” or even a “shrinking pie”.  For this reason, everything becomes a zero sum game between different groups elbowing each other for part of a limited size pie.  Labor negotiations, work-flow to other countries and competing tax rates all essentially each add or subtract from a limited supply of the goodies available for them.  The Atlanticist view may be overly optimistic, but I’ll choose it any day over the “shrinking pie theory”.  It will be interesting to see how things crack up here following the present elections and if people can shake of the 1970’s Carter-era type malaise they’re in. 

In any case, things here are fine.  We’re continuing to have fun, travel around a bit and make up crazy theories to try to understand the people around us.  Hope you are well and that I see you sometime soon.

                                                                                                Cheers, -ivo