Travelogue: Work in Copenhagen & Berlin Trip

Hej! ("Hi" in Danish)Been already 7 weeks since I got to Copenhagen and I know I haven't kept my intent of writing my travel experiences more frequently. Can I hear you sigh? Cmon' - you surely like reading good expression in the beautiful English language. Well, just wish my sense of humour was as good as my ability to express. There I go again!

Have had a lot of new things happening around, some not so eye-popping and some feeling quite fascinating. One thing I am trying to figure out is why people in cold places eat cold food and people in hot places eat Hot (all meanings included) food. By now, I have got pretty much used to having cold salad and bread for my lunch at office, which is free of course. There is obviously the intermittent breaks of soup and hot boiled potatoes that gets me excited :)

For the uninvolved and uninitiated, I am interning here with a Danish software company called Maconomy. They treat me pretty well, as I realised from being introduced to every single employee (about 200 of them) across four floors of the company HQ office. Kind of a lil scary as well, because I came on exchange thinking I will take it easy and focus on travelling wonderful Europe. Well, that makes life exciting allright!

My project is interesting, since I didn't know what and how I was going to do it. But this is one of the best things the MBA teaches you. Go search the world for examples (The "google: is not enough), read 3-4 of them, see what went right and wrong and VOILA - you have found some kind of a solution. Frankly, you must be somewhat common sensical to figure out whats applicable and whats not. And if you are a little more interested, you just have to construct the value chain backwards and forward, and you should know what you have to do. Thats my MBA (Mouth Babbles Anything) for you.Anythings Possible!

Hmm. . something more interesting and worthwhile was the Berlin trip. I have, for some subconcious reason, been thoroughly cherishing going to Germany for about the last 5 years atleast. However, the Berlin trip wasn't exactly a 'Discover Germany' plan. It was more of an instantaneous weekend plan, which I struck up with Bora (a colleague from Singapore). And it pretty much stayed different from the "German" trip i had imagined. Berlin is a wonderful and exciting city. There are some cities in the world which just have a feel of vibrancy, and Berlin surely counts as on of them.

The first thing I realised after landing at 6 in the morning, was that it was cold. COlder than Copenhagen! I was wondering if I was gonna survive the trip without any repurcussions. But Berlin, for the connection that it struck with me, had a bright and sunny weather setup for me for the rest of the trip :) The second thing, and I will make this count the last, was that Berlin was a huge, really huge city. The city's geographical spread is more than 9 times that of Paris. Wondering if Paris is small or just that Berlin is humungus.We went looking for a budget hotel we had decided to stay in, and walked for an hour to reach it. We reached the street quick, but just that the hotel was just on the other end of the street, about 3 kms down. Dumped our stuff in the 8-bed dorm we got for our kind of money, and set out for the day.

I wanted to the Technical museum, so we decided to do that first and then take a city tour in the afternoon. I loved the technical museum, for among other things, they had displayed a brand new Bajaj autorickshaw (the classic Indian "anywhere anytime" transport) in their evolution depiction of scooters. One thing that set me thinking was the amazing technical expertise the Germans have always demonstrated, and the apparent lack of intellectual capacity to set up a good system of governance. This is not my idea, I must assert, it is something that I just read about in the museums and memorials. My overall impression about the museum wasn't great, perhaps because most of the descriptions were in German and I could not read much.

We got to the meeting point of a guided tour we decided to take by 3 in the afternoon. And I had one of the loveliest fruit-pie i have had accompanied with a good Latte from Hagen-Dazz. The guided tour was quite good and was worth the 10 Euros we paid for it. We sequentially were taken through the River Spree, Museum Island, Pergamon Museum, the Berlin Cathedral, Humboldt UNiversity (where Einstein taught before being forced to leave for Princeton),the palaces, WW2 memorial, Brandenburg Gate (symbolising the divide between the east and west Germany), the Concentration camp memorial, Checkpoint Charlie (well known for a few stories), the remaining Berlin wall and the Gendarmemarkt (where the Berlin Concert House is).

Will not describe all these places, but the feeling one gets while walking through all these is that, these are such an integral part of the city's life and I just kept thinking, how much history the place had seen. Even uptil as recently as the 15 years back. For those of you who havent seen this one German movie, please try and watch "Good Bye Lenin". Its a simple yet fantastic story of the fall of the Berlin wall. Saw this last year when I was taking German language lessons in Singapore.

We had planned a trip to the Sachanhausen concentration camp the next day and another trip to Potsdam, a place of many castles and gardens. Sachanhausen camp was the HQ of the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany. So it represents the full scale of the concentration camps in more ways than one. It was designed to be the model camp and theuse of geometry in the design is very fascinating. The camp is designed to be an equilateral triangle, with the one entry/exit point located in the middle of one of the sides. Guards on top of this entry/exit tower had a view of the entire camp, and had machine guns which could access any point on the vast area of a triangular hell. I wasn't very moved by the camp memorial, because the serenity of the grass (most of the camp has been razed to the ground) covered the horrifying actions of a few mortal men. But you should just watch one of the movies (my personal favourite is Schindler's list) based on this, and you shouldn't need any further evidence.

We chucked the plan to go to Potsdam for the lack of time, and instead took a boat tour of the city and then walked the central street, realizing that it was the German Unification day. There were people all over the place and one of the concerts we managed to get to had a great band playing. The music and the atmosphere was just something you could not possibly not like.

Obviously there are many details that I have skipped about the trip. But I would rather put in my thoughts about the city than make another tourist guide. More essential than having your best walking shoes on, is to be open to what the place has to offer you. And I think, on many occassions, we just miss the entire point in our haste to see places than feel and understand them. And feeling the present is as important as getting an idea about the past, if not more. I hope that I can keep this in mind as I go to newer places (for me), but the oldest places of recorded history and culture in the world.

Back in Copenhagen, trying to motivate myself to know this place a little more. There is much to learn from here, but its not going to come easy. The people are hard to get out talking, so you need to just need to keepp trying. Thankfully, and luckily for me, I got a bike today. An office colleague borrowed her old bike to me. Quite sweet of her! And very unilike Denmark. .Life is full of surprises. We just don't allow ourselves to be surprised.Hope this wasn't too long.

Hope you liked it!

Tschuss (Bye in German)
Wanderer