Ice in Berlin and Chaos Abroad

It has snowed again, after freezing rain, so after eschewing my bicycle and taking the U-Bahn to university, I walked between two stations on the way home to look at the scenery today.

On the streets and sidewalks, the weather brought us compacted ice, a sprinkling of snow rather like powdered sugar (footprints and tire treads stenciled out of it), and crushed gravel sprayed by the diligent snowplows of the Berliner Stadtreinigung and others. Around the bodies of cars, fringes of icicles were hanging. And where trees and bushes were not gloved in ice, they were frosted white.

I looked at paw-prints of dogs in the snow as I walked parallel to the U-Bahn tracks in Dahlem, and the glowing rose hips and red hawthorn berries in the hedges, the male hazel catkins with dark glossy blots where ice had settled. Two Nordic walkers energetically approached, but the rest of us who didn't wield pointy sticks were a little more careful.

Of course the stairs into the U-Bahn were gritty and splotched brown with the crushed gravel that we were tracking in.

I'VE BEEN a bit psychologically hung over from the weekend, since Saturday was unusually busy and besides my sleep pattern has been disrupted by e.g. a funny burning smell in our apartment keeping me awake past 5 a.m. one day. But part of the activity on Saturday was lunch in Prenzlauer Berg, in good company. To go into too much detail about the more trivial part: French toast served with finely chopped pineapple, kiwi and strawberry slices, halved grapes, lashings of maple syrup, and whipping cream (all of it reminiscent of the summer weather that is currently far, far away). For my drink I had fresh ginger tea with mint leaves and a fragment of orange. And afterward, in a small family evening get-together, we commemorated Papa with music and conversation and food; he would have turned 73 the week before last.

Due to the 'hangover,' I've already skipped two university classes this week. That said, the marks on my Spanish class presentation came in, and the professor was so impressed that he gave me a 1,0. Not very well deserved, perhaps, but it's comforting for academic and professional reasons to edge closer to the official B2 European language level in Spanish.

RETURNING to the café meal: In my budget, there is less room for discretionary spending. At a guess I still power through some €1250 per month, however. Of course the rent that I pay my mother is not extortionate (not to mention that my siblings and mother have repeatedly urged me to decrease the payments), and the biggest other expenditure is health insurance. So some of the rest still goes to fun stuff, like French toast. But I recently received good news: a private pension fund, into which my employer paid for two years, has been dissolved. So I am expecting a windfall of around €2500 after taxes etc.

On the job front, I've been offering myself as a tutor (partly because I've liked instilling knowledge, partly also because I really want to mother-hen somebody again). I also applied to be a participant a.k.a. guinea pig in a medical study. The second possibility has withered a little: when I'd filled out the screening form, they replied saying that my migraines rendered me ineligible.

AS FOR LESS personal events, the news has been despicable.

Firstly, I'm not too keen on the EU Commission's pursuit of new free trade agreements with South America and India as a way out of our dependence on the whims of the Queens real estate magnate in the White House: surely we have learned that free trade needs to be approached carefully. If I understand correctly, one long-term effect of past agreements like NAFTA seems to have been collapsing industries that help keep rural areas or specific towns economically and socially thriving, thereby fuelling populism and unlivable hardship in those areas. Being locked in Faustian bargains with the Mileis and Modis of this world also does not seem much better than being locked in Faustian bargains with the Trumps of this world. But so far those concerns also pale in comparison to the bloodshed in Minneapolis.

As for the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, I was (like many others) especially happy about Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech. Specifically I liked that he acknowledged that international law has not been followed consistently in the past, but embraced the idea of 'middle powers' cooperating with each other, all while quoting Thucydides and displaying considerable backbone. But Chancellor Friedrich Merz's speech was worrying. Merz should have pointed out that the 'brutal new reality' that he describes in world affairs goes against the laws and best practices that Germany is obligated to defend, given the lessons of its own Fascist history. Instead, as far as I could tell, he suggested hopping on the bandwagon, although with an eye to extracting advantages for the EU. Similarly I think that NATO's head Mark Rutte is taking a page out of Trump's amoral book by negotiating over Greenland and Denmark's heads.

If indeed US and EU security experts, as the New York Times reported, agree that Russia and China seem to have little interest in Greenland at present, Merz's suggestion at Davos that Russia is the main threat was also especially toadying and embarrassing. As for the other speakers, I didn't bother watching Trump's speech. Much though I liked aspects of France's president Macron's speech, I felt that like Ukraine's president Zelensky's speech, it represented a descent into a Trumpian style of airing everything that pops into one's head.

Returning to the aforementioned Chancellor, I was reasonably happy with Angela Merkel as chancellor, though rarely ecstatic. I'm also trying to give Merz the benefit of the doubt because the role of chancellor is so demanding, and I'm sure he's trying. But, as a happily irresponsible member of the peanut gallery, I'll just frankly divulge did not expect her successor to fall as short in terms of percipience, charm, and moral stature, as he has.

That said, Davos offered one comfort. Last year I stopped watching any videos from the Forum because the pro-Trump paeans from roundtable discussion moderators etc. were nauseating. It also wasn't surprising to me to read from the point of view a New York Times reporter who has been to Davos repeatedly, that the Forum has lost any genuine desire for sustainable policy and business practices that it once pursued. Instead it has dedicated itself to empty "virtue signalling" (once signalling DEI and climate change reduction, and now signalling more Trumpian 'virtues'). But this year at least there was some intellectual friction.

INSPIRED mostly by the not-at-all-unhinged situation around Greenland, I've been taking notes on how to put together an emergency kit:

I've gotten as far as putting 1.5 L (per the Red Cross it should be 1 gallon) of water in my room. Next up: putting together a supply of survival food, Item #2 on a 31-item list. As I told my brother Ge., at least I haven't gone so far as to consider iodine tablets or a Geiger counter... These paranoid preparations, which I'd admittedly scoff at any other time, should be useful in case someone decides to sabotage parts of Berlin's electrical supply again, too.

And once the university semester is over — 2 or 3 weeks of classes, 2 essays, and 1 class presentation are left before mid-February — maybe I will finally take that First Aid course...

In the meantime I've signed up for another food-sorting shift at the same Berlin charity whose challenging field of work inspired me to write the whiny descriptions of rotten carrots etc. over the summer. The shift should take place next weekend.

The Ominous First Ten Days of 2026

New Year's Eve was much calmer this year in Berlin, so if the U.S. government hadn't decided to invade Venezuela a few days later it would have been a quiet transition into 2026. Even the New Year's concert of the Vienna Philharmonic was, I thought, a pleasing balance between the traditional, modern, and absurd; if the Canadian conductor was a little obsessed with his own presence at the event, I still thought he wove his knowledge of late 19th century French impressionist composers into Strauss and his contemporaries in a way that gave the first half of the concert different nuances. (In the second half I felt he ran out of steam, especially after the Egyptian March.) I liked the first ballet performance a lot, too: elegant dancers pretended to emerge from a diplomatic vehicle, and pranced around a Viennese building in pastel-coloured pantsuits. It felt like a fantasy of a world order where diplomacy isn't Steve Witkoff grinning shyly across a Kremlin table at Vladimir Putin, alongside a poker-faced Jared Kushner.

But as it was, on January 3rd I cycled to a demonstration against the Venezuela intervention, which had been registered with Berlin's police earlier that day. It was an adventurous ride: for the first two minutes it felt like the snowflakes were lacerating my eyeballs, and even after the snowfall lessened, my tires slipped and skidded on the bicycle paths. A few beleaguered bicycle deliverymen were undertaking the same route. Then I decided to switch into the car lanes, after walking partway along the sidewalks while pushing my bicycle, and somehow I arrived in one piece at Brandenburg Gate, beside the U.S. Embassy. A crowd had gathered and police officers were surveilling a line of security fences, set up on two sides of the mass of people, designed to protect the Embassy. I was undecided at first to be part of the protest as a private citizen or whether report as an observer, but since a lot of agendas were mixing in the crowd, I eventually decided for the second. It seemed to me that most of the protestors were German-speaking, and belonged to a coalition of far-left and communist groups. I counted well over 100 people— a police officer told me he'd estimate about 250 — and I felt it was a decent turnout, especially given the short notice.

A massive power outage happened on the same day due to sabotage. It wasn't in my part of Berlin, so I have no firsthand experience to report except that — unlike some politicians and part of the press — I am not particularly scandalized that the city's mayor popped out for an hour of tennis practice on the first day. I will say that in general the U-Bahn seemed less crowded, but that might be because of the parlous state of Berlin's icy sidewalks for the past week.

My youngest brother shared with me an apt meme adapted from Hergé's comics: Captain Haddock sits, exhausted, at a bar while Snowy eyes his glass of whiskey, and exclaims "What a year, huh?" Tintin replies, "Captain, it's January 3rd."

I've been wondering from time to time what to do if Canada is invaded. For some reason my paternal grandfather pops into my head as the person whom I'd ask, if he hadn't died twenty years ago. He of course served on the wrong side in World War II. I feel that he would frown on any idea of fixing the problem by taking up arms myself, but would approve my general tendency to want to get a sound training in First Aid, if not a paramedic's training, and put that training to use. Especially after seeing what home care aides go through, I figure that providing health care is harrowing and psychologically risky enough to count as a dedicated service.

The university semester is picking up speed again. I skipped two classes last week, and two classes were cancelled, so I had one in-person class and three online classes. For Wednesday I need to prepare a presentation in Spanish, which is leading to the usual low-level classroom stress. It will be about the effects of migration on children.