Berlin

Maria and I just finished a FREE bicycle tour of Berlin. Our tour guide, Dave from Kansas, was uber friendly and knowledgeable and should definitely take up the professorial career he dreams of pursuing. We met a lot of good folks on the tour, including Ben from Warwick, R.I., who was high school teammates with a friend of mine from William & Mary´s cross country team. He also knows a friend of ours from BC who is dating Maria´s close friend, Holly. Very small world. We are going to go out drinking with them tonight on what´s considered the second leg of our Berlin tour. We´ll upload pictures soon, but we hit all the classic sites in Berlin, including the Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust Memorial, and even detoured into a beer garden for a refreshing beverage. That .5 liter beverage would come back to haunt me somewhere during hour three of the tour, as Dave feverishly described the atmosphere in Berlin as the wall was coming down. I was worried that my pants would have to come down in a similarly frenzied matter as a steady stream of democracy was about to pour forth from my Checkpoint Carlie.

Also, we visited Monaco a few days ago, and I learned a great deal about what wealth actually means. At school, wealth is three packs of ramen and a fake ID. At home, wealth is the privilege of shoveling snow off a cement path leading from your mailbox to your front door. In America, wealth is as tacky and temporary as Kevin Federline. In Monaco, wealth is a private helicoptor docked on your private yacht parked in a private slip in an exclusive marina. There, wealth is a private beach with man-made shade. (I couldn´t quite put my finger on what was amiss after Maria and I stepped from the sun-soaked boardwalk onto the cool pebble beach. Aha! It was a living recreation of Mr. Burn´s plan to block out the sun in Springfield.) In Monaco, wealth is associated with regality. In the U.S., wealth is a free pass to drink and drive without consequence. I am not saying that Monaco´s wealth isn´t ostentatious, it is--very much so, but unlike in the U.S., the people with money conduct themselves with a certain degree of class. Money in America, for the most part, is a race to the bottom of the norms of social etiquette.