News

15 minute news overview (watching Tagesschau before the movies is a tradition for many households)
Sports
Stock market

Magazines & Advice Columns

Cars & Traffic
Health
Home & Garden
Internet (tips & tricks)
Money
Technology
Culture magazine
Science magazine
Religious Messages (alternating weekly between Protestant and Catholic speakers)

Courses / Lectures

Beginner’s Cooking Course
Astronomy & astrophysics – explained in everyday German
Knowledge for kids
Biology for kids – much-acclaimed cartoon series
History for kids – much-acclaimed cartoon series

Documentaries & Expert discussion rounds

Traveling around the World
Animals around the World
Bundestag – live and archived video from the German parliament
Political discussions
More political discussions
Social discussions
On media – how reporting works in unfree places, the relation of media & politics/economy etc.
Various discussions
Various documentaries – a lot of surprising topics

Fiction

Türkisch für Anfänger – modern soap, transcripts and translations available
Tatort – the most popular German detective series
Lindenstraße – Germany’s longest-running soap opera
Verliebt in Berlin – telenovela
Jim Knopf – beloved old-style kids’ story, all done with marionettes
Naruto – an example of translated anime
Court show

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a starting point for those who wouldn’t know what to search for. Enjoy!

Please let me know if you can’t open any of these videos – some might be geographically limited – or if any infringe on copyright. From what I can see, they were all uploaded by the producers or TV stations themselves.

Firstly, health insurance companies try to make money. I’m not blaming them for it; it’s what companies are supposed to do. But in this case, them making money is at direct odds with them providing as much care as you need. To make more money, they have to cut the costs, that is, to try to give you as little care as possible. And that may endanger lives. Ideally, the system would be set up in such a way that the more responsibly they care for you, the more profit they make, but that’s difficult to set up.

Secondly, the health care market is one of the least transparent markets ever – you can only tell the quality of the product (and warn others off bad purchases) several years after you’ve bought it. In more transparent markets, capitalism makes for natural checks on companies. For example, if someone sells moldy vegetables at a market, he is punished by not getting customers. If a delivery service sells yucky food, it will eventually lose business through bad reviews. This prevents excesses – but in an nontransparent market such as health care, and with it being very difficult to change companies to boot, these natural checks cannot function adequately.

Thirdly, you can’t afford health care when you most need it. Everybody needs more health care services as they get old and their bodies don’t function as well as they used to anymore. Yet nobody I know is expecting to have the most cash on hand as a retiree – most retirees are happy if they can maintain their previous standard of living while not making money anymore. Another thing is that the most expensive illnesses are the ones that also keep you away from work for a long time, cancer for example. If you are so unfortunate to get cancer in a purely capitalist system, you not only lose your source of income but also suddenly have much higher expenses. Again – not blaming companies, it’s basic business logic to charge the one who is 30% likely to cost you a lot more than the one who is 1% likely to cost you a lot, or to try to prevent the 30% guy from buying your insurance at all. Just the resulting picture isn’t pretty in this case. The solution is to have people pay the most while they are young and healthy and earning well and don’t need much health care, and then provide lots of health care at low or zero cost when people are old or sick and not earning money anymore. From each according to his means, to each according to his needs. This is the Communist idea behind European health care systems.

In Germany for example, the price of public health insurance is a percentage of your income. It increases and decreases with your income rather than with your health status, so that it should remain affordable at all times (to make up for it being compulsory). You can keep the same plan even when changing jobs. And when you’re unemployed or otherwise unable to afford it, the government takes over payments to your existing health insurance plan until you’re earning money again.

Chinese: 3 hours; learned 212 new HSK words in Anki. On the bright side, I now have Anki on my boyfriend’s iPhone, so that reviewing while lounging on the couch or while commuting is an awesome prospect. I’m tempted to get an iPhone or iPod Touch for myself just because of this.

French: 3 hours.

Greek: 10 hours; 4 new lessons, so now on Assimil lesson 77. My Myngle flat rate for Greek lessons is over, so I will be able to focus more on other materials, but I’m afraid of my conversation skill deteriorating too quickly.

Swahili: 4 hours; 5 new lessons, now I’m on Assimil lesson 51. Active wave, yay!

Esperanto and Spanish: Almost nothing, since that trip to Argentina is not looking so likely now.

I grew up in a small town and I never thought that I could like a big city. The noise, the hectic, miles upon miles of concrete… I’m a fan of quiet and beauty and I have enough stress that I don’t need others radiating theirs onto me. Planning the future, I never saw myself winding up in a big city.

Well, then I met Chuck and Chuck, having lived in NYC, can’t be happy in a small town. We were still debating whether to move to Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Köln [Cologne] or another city when we got a job offer for the both of us in Berlin, and after a short visit the decision was made. The job turned out badly after 6 months, but I never regret having come here, I’d go as far as to say that it was the best decision of my life.

Berlin is an awesome city, as anyone who visited us can tell you – 75% of our guests spontaneously decide to try to move to Berlin. The climate is very pleasant, there are lots of things to do, lots of historic sites and lots of art and beauty. Berliners are an open people, sometimes said to be too frank, but welcoming people of all nationalities, all religions and all sexual orientations. The mayor of Berlin is openly homosexual and coined two famous phrases: “I’m gay… and that’s all right, too” (the latter now title of his autobiography) and “Berlin – poor but sexy”. He has a point. Berlin is comparatively poor as European metropoles go due to absorbing commie East Berlin, and Berliners are unwilling to be impressed by Armani suits or fancy cars… but the city is sexy. Not glamorous or posh, but unique, with its own character, and always innovating. It’s a mecca for IT start-ups and artists. Nowhere else is it so cheap to put something out there and see how it fares in a world city, among tourists, expats and locals.

Berlin rents are grotesque – it’s cheaper to live in the center city of Berlin than it is to live in the center city of Wroclaw, Poland; and in Munich or Düsseldorf you’ll easily pay several times as much. Yet Berlin is and always has been international in a way that you won’t easily find in Europe. After 1945, the city was divided between the USA, the UK, France and the USSR, with many soldiers and civilians from those countries taking up residence here. Nowadays however, you can literally find any nationality in Berlin (and we’re about to celebrate that fact with the Karneval der Kulturen). Within 10 minutes walking distance of my apartment I can literally reach about 10 different Indian restaurants, 10 Vietnamese restaurants, 9 Japanese restaurants, 5 Turkish ones, 4 Thai ones, a few Middle Eastern ones, and even a Cuban and a Singaporean restaurant! (Also German ones of course.) Also, getting foreign groceries or books in a foreign language is absolutely no problem.

This is one of the reasons we chose to live in the Scheunenviertel in Berlin-Mitte. There’s also the convenience of being able to reach almost everything on foot, including the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie and Alexanderplatz. Other things, such as Berlin’s English-language cinema or the main train station, are just a few light-rail stops away. I don’t need to take the light-rail to reach the river Spree, which I love to walk along:
(took the photo myself)

The climate is mostly pleasant, with little precipitation all year round, not too hot in summer (you may miss air conditioning one or two of the days) and generally not going far beyond the freezing point in winter.

How to move here

Now for the actual point of my post. Recently several people asked me for advice on how to find an apartment here, so I want to summarize this for everyone.

The best place to find apartments for rent (including a smaller selection of furnished apartments for holidays) is ImmobilienScout24.de. If you’re specifically looking for a short-term thing, you may also find something at Zwischenmiete.de, or look for uncomplicated deals on the black boards of Berlin’s three major universities. Those aren’t online, but you could try posting a message on
this forum dedicated to Berlin’s university students. All of these sites are in German.

If your German is not good enough yet, GermanPod101 published a bunch of lessons specifically about saying what you need in an apartment, reading apartment ads, talking to landlords and understanding rental contracts.

Some things in general to look out for:
- Every landlord will have you pay a “Kaution” (deposit), that’s normal and you’ll get the money back when you move out.
- A “Provision” (referral fee) however is something you won’t get back, and in Berlin it’s easy to avoid the apartments that charge this
- In your position, I would definitely look for the three letters EBK (= “Einbauküche”, built-in kitchen), because otherwise you only get a stove and a sink and you have to spend a lot of money on cabinets and fridge.

With the reunification a lot of East Germans fled to the West as soon as they could, so a lot of apartments and houses are vacant in the East, sometimes up to a third of a city. East Berlin didn’t suffer from this as much as East Germany did, but still one good thing to come out of it is that there’s never a housing shortage in Berlin. This development is probably also the cause of low rents here.

Both East and West Berlin had an excellent public transport system, so public transport in Berlin will get you everywhere at all hours of the day or night; driving is not recommended because of congestion in the center and the old streets, which are too narrow to support many lanes. Berlin is a very spread-out city though, due to the lack of skyscrapers, so distances can be large. If you think you’ll be going out a lot, I’d choose an apartment that’s within 2 kilometers from either Kurfürstendamm or Unter den Linden (the two focal points) – but obviously not on those streets, because they’re expensive.

In terms of boroughs, Neukölln is the only unsafe one, in any of the others you should be fine walking around alone at night; Berlin is generally a very safe place – except on May 1st (Labor Day in Europe) for the annual battle between leftists and police in Kreuzberg. The borough Kreuzberg is popular with anarchists, leftists, those of an alternative lifestyle and Turkish immigrants, but it has gentrified enough not to be unsafe. The borough Prenzlauer Berg is sometimes recommended because of its nightlife, but on the other hand it’s like a catwalk during the day and women may not be comfortable if they don’t dress like that; the other boroughs are more relaxed.

My boyfriend and I live in the Scheunenviertel in the borough “Mitte”, which is the oldest part of Berlin and the center city of former East Berlin but very close to West Berlin; there’s a line on the street marking where the Wall used to be about 300 metres from here. In this part every fifth house is an art gallery (I’m not exaggerating!). We’re very happy here.

Anyway, if you’re moving to Berlin, or even just visiting, I’m happy for you and I hope you’ll enjoy your stay!

What I love most about Go is its surreal elegance. The rules are as simple as you could wish for, hardly more difficult than those of Tic Tac Toe, yet the game they create is so profound that you could (and some do) study it full-time a whole life long.

At every point, you have a choice between more than a hundred legal moves. This makes the game a natural target for AI research, since brute-force calculation is not an option. Humans however see slow, clunky moves, fast, swift and maybe even too reckless moves, ugly moves and moves of a zen-like beauty.

Go is a game I cherish, even if I can’t give it as much time as it deserves. If you would like to learn this beautiful ancient game, try the Interactive Way to Go or check out one of my lectures tomorrow: for Americans or for Europeans.

Finally, here are some of my favourite quotes about Go:

“Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double entry accounting.”
– from Shibumi , bestseller by Trevanian

“While the Baroque rules of chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go.
– Edward Lasker, chess grandmaster

“That play of black upon white, white upon black, has the intent and takes the form of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony of music. Everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck, or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight of his own. A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary.”
– Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go