Month: January 2020

<Post written by Bryan & Joanna>

As 2020 begins, we’re looking ahead to the next chapter, after our wandering sabbatical year in Berlin. One of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves is where to call home. We acknowledge how incredibly lucky and privileged we are to have the opportunity to consider & choose where to live. Many people do not have this freedom. This year we lived for a bit in Berlin, stayed for a while in New York and London, and visited many other cities in the US and around Europe.

As we’ve traveled, we have felt how life is similar and different in each city. It’s helped us hone our senses and discuss what we each like and what matters to us, even as we remember that most of what makes life happy and fulfilling is not where we live, but rather how and with whom. Here are some of the main things we’ve been thinking about as we contemplate where to live starting in 2020. Wherever we land, we hope to stay there at least 3-4 years, and then reconsider whether we want to stay or move on.

Diversity & Integration

For us, places where people with diverse backgrounds & interests can live together are better places to live. They’re more equitable and offer more enriching life experiences to all residents.

Diversity is just one piece of the puzzle — we also want a place that’s well-integrated, where people of all kinds share common space, whether at markets, schools, restaurants, playing fields, or community groups. For instance, while San Francisco is relatively diverse as a whole, its neighbourhoods and schools are less well integrated.

During our travels this year, we’ve walked through many urban boundaries. We’ve crossed a street and gone from a restaurant with all White customers to a church with all Black attendees, or from age-diverse non-hipster stores to young hipster-central, or from fancy terraced houses to world-class tourist trap. While we were in the US, we enjoyed comparing our experiences on the ground with maps of diversity data. The University of Virginia Dot Map is especially readable (runner up: National Geographic’s Diversity Map).

Easy Access to Nature & Cuteness

We care a lot about the urban environment we participate in and how it feels.

For both of us, having nature nearby nourishes life — from the trees that we see out the window, to parks and waterways nearby for walks, to wilderness we can easily reach. We want to be in a vibrant, dense city environment, yet a quick hop from an ocean, forest, lake, or mountain. While here in Berlin, the city parks and country lakes have been wonderful, especially in summer, but we’ve missed dipping our toes in the Pacific Ocean and hiking in the Sierras. It’s flat here for a hundred miles in every direction, and the tallest thing nearby is a World War II rubble heap.

For Joanna, beautiful buildings (as opposed to ugly flat boxes) are also important. The more crown moulding there is, the better. Though a natural wood look is nice, too. Bryan’s a little more lax on this criterion — he appreciates homes that blur inside and outside, but he’s okay with anything that is not a brutalist chunk of concrete. Too many years spent in the depths of the MC in Waterloo.

Great Urban Mobility

Moving from one place to another fills a good chunk of our daily lives. This is why we prefer to live in mixed-use areas where we can move quickly, delightfully, and safely through a typical day.

Ideally we also want to be able to commute to work and meet up with friends in under 30 minutes by bike or transit. Also we’d like everything we need day-to-day within a nice 5 minute walk or bike ride. This means we should be able to get to the grocery, doctor, gym, yoga, haircut, bakery, drug store, tasty restaurants, Döner kebab, and nifty cultural things. Our neighborhood in Berlin, Kreuzberg, fits the bill:

A few factors that contribute to great mobility in Kreuzberg are good bike infrastructure, high density buildings that are all 6-7 stories, mixed-use zoning, and walkable street blocks. In his post about life in Berlin, Bryan wrote a lot more about why mobility is so delightful. Even on our quiet side street, there are a couple dozen businesses on the block – everything from a daycare to an orthopedic center. You can see what this feels like in a bike tour near our house:

New York and Berlin definitely come out ahead in mobility (though getting from Brooklyn to Harlem is not exactly fast). London was also very dense, but tended to have less mixed-use zoning. It felt like everyone takes the tube to different areas for sleep, work, and entertainment. Parts of the city felt like ghost towns in the morning, mid-day, or evening. The San Francisco Bay Area is okay by American standards, but has pretty awful urban mobility in comparison.

Delightful Culture

Joanna likes having access to great museums, performing arts, talks, and other fun activities. It’s the best when there are a million things going on at once, and nearby. She also values being in a place with a sense of history, where people feel a connection to their heritage and like to explore how their history can inform today’s culture. She appreciates the sense of purpose and energy that comes from common acknowledgment there is much to be done to make our community (neighborhood, city, region, world…) a better place. Joanna also likes living somewhere relatively non-materialistic (except for beautiful buildings & public space), where there is less focus on buying nifty objects and waiting in lines, and more on picnicking in the park, visiting a museum, or going on a bike ride.

While there are many smaller places with great culture, Joanna really does like having many many things going on. For example, Santa Fe was great culture-wise, but at the same time rather sleepy. Joanna liked living in Bonn for a summer back in 2011, too – but it’s also quiet for our current life stage. For now, Joanna thinks a metropolitan area of around 6 million or (preferably) more people is nice. For Bryan, how vibrant a city is also matters, but there are smaller cities that he thinks are nice too. Like Denver, at just under 3 million.

We’ll reconsider in 3-4 years. There aren’t too many cities that are that big, so it’s a little limiting.

Strong Social Services

Social services are important to us, both for ourselves and because they allow for a more fair and equitable society. Everyone should have access to quality food, housing, healthcare, education, childcare, other parenting support (e.g., parental leave), work-life balance, and retirement. When people do hit a rough patch, they should be reasonably supported rather than unnecessarily or excessively punished/criminalized.

Germany excels on all of these fronts. We have friends here who quit work for a few years to go back to university. University tuition is nearly free. There’s no pervasive competition to move to the neighborhoods with the best schools or send kids to private school, creating more pressure to earn. Our friends here take more than a month of vacation a year, and several work four-day weeks. New parents get a year of paid leave, shared across both partners. Unemployment payments are generous, and recipients can also take a range of actually-quite-reasonable courses to improve their job prospects. There’s no stigma associated with being temporarily unemployed, and the consequences are rarely catastrophic (except in parts of the East, where there is some systemic unemployment associated with the decline of manufacturing post-socialism). The criminal justice system is also more humane, with better prison conditions, much shorter sentences, and somewhat less systemic racism. Of course, racism and white nationalism are certainly still big problems in Germany – for example, minority kids are systemically tracked into worse schools, and there was recently something in the news about an extremist state legislator in the former East shouting “Negro” repeatedly during a legislative session (and then claiming he wasn’t being racist…). But still, incarceration rates are an order of magnitude lower than in the US, and rates of homeless people on the streets are an order of magnitude lower than in SF (though overall housing insecurity rates are similar).

In the US, social supports are weaker. While we’re fortunate to have some savings, to live a German lifestyle in the US, we’d both need to maintain high-paying jobs. That’s the only reliable way to build savings and pay for services the government does not cover well. Plus we’ll both need to continue fighting at work to show that it’s what you do that matters, not how many hours you work.

And of course, no matter what we do, there will be many people around us who cannot afford that lifestyle and are suffering from lack of social services and high levels of systemic injustice. Bryan is fine with this, because inequality of opportunity is far worse globally, and in the US one can do more to improve things everywhere. Joanna agrees that the US is a great place to work on changing the world for the better – it is vibrant, ambitious, and powerful. However, it still makes her uncomfortable to be in a society that she believes accepts too much injustice, and to some degree even praises inequality.

Perhaps because of being raised on stories of the Holocaust and having lived for a couple of years in Germany, Joanna also goes through life asking herself with reasonable frequency: Are there ways in which our society is committing crimes similar to what the Nazis did? How am I personally complicit? What actions could I take to be less complicit? Acknowledging that everybody is to some degree complicit, am I okay with my degree of complicity? These are difficult questions.

Affordability

A place must also be affordable, given the salaries we might have. This is one area where relative differences are more important long term than absolute differences.

For example, even though everything costs a half or a third as much in Berlin vs. San Francisco, the salaries are also about a third. On the flip side, there are more social services offered in Germany. While our American savings go farther here in absolute terms, if we stay long term, what matters more is our relative purchasing power.

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In the end, Berlin, SF, and NYC look like roughly a wash. London stands out as comparably unaffordable, with expenses closer to NYC and SF but salaries closer to Berlin. It seemed that cost of living makes a real impact on many Londoners’ quality of life – very long commutes, being forced to live in areas with poor air quality, and less ability to take advantage of all the amazing cultural offerings of the city. However, it’s always hard to judge from the outside – it seems these concerns, along with gentrification, are present in just about every city we visit.

Family & Friends

We’re totally burying the lede. Friends and family are the most important of all. This year we’ve missed seeing all of you in Canada and the US — you’re so far away!!

Good Career Opportunities

This is the other super-important item. We want a place where we can both find impactful, rewarding work in 2020. Deciding what to do for work is a huge topic unto itself!

Joanna has previously had a hard time finding work in Germany, but this time around she felt she could find something in scooters or electric mobility. Trickier than finding work in the US, and there’s also a lot of sexism in the workplace, but doable.

Bryan spent time looking, but it was harder to find interesting work in Berlin. While the tech scene’s been growing in the last decade, it is small in comparison to the other cities, with few interesting openings for more senior engineers. Plus there’s a critical mass of talent and companies in fewer industries, like Finance, Advertising, and E-commerce, all areas Bryan’s currently less interested in working in.

What’s Next?

While there are many good places to live, no place checks every box. It’s been hard to choose. A few months ago, New York, Berlin, London, and San Francisco were still on our short list — they are all reasonable in almost every area above.

After deliberating, we’ve decided to go back to the US and move to either San Francisco or New York. Let us know if you have thoughts on where we should go!

London was wonderful in many ways, but it felt harder to afford, less mixed-use in many areas, and a bit less social-democratic than the rest of Europe. While Berlin is a wonderful city to live in, there are far fewer interesting jobs for Bryan, and likely also fewer for Joanna. Plus we’ll be closer to all of you in North America! But Joanna will still very much miss Berlin, and so we promised to reconsider living in Europe in a few years.

We’ll be arriving in San Francisco on January 27 and will see where life takes us after that. Until we find work, we’ll be staying in North Berkeley. If you’re in the Bay Area, we’d love to see you!

<This post is by Joanna.>

Before we came to Berlin, I told Bryan all about how cold it was, and how it might never get more than a degree or two above freezing in January or February. And yet, here we are in mid-January, and it’s been so warm I don’t even need my heavy jacket. Apparently it’s been warm the past several years now.

I haven’t super researched the climate predictions for Berlin, but here’s what a nifty study of cities’ 2050 climates says (the website has a nice visualization to check all your favorite cities, as well as a spreadsheet with more details if you’re curious):

By 2050, the climate of Berlin will be most similar to that of current-day Canberra. The maximum temperature of the warmest month is likely to increase by 6.1°C, resulting in a mean annual temperature change of 1.8°C.

Crowther Lab, Cities of the Future

I’ve also heard people cite predictions that German summers will be significantly hotter (they are already getting hotter), and that there will be even more drought and flash-flooding across the country (also already starting to happen). I was a bit sad this summer that one of my favorite Berlin parks, Hasenheide, had rather dry and brown grass instead of the lush green of my memories.

And clearly winters are getting warmer too! Personally I’m pretty happy to be able to walk and bike outside comfortably. But… I also know that this is very much not what the weather is “supposed to be” in January.

I wonder what future generations will think of their climates. I guess they’ll be used to whatever they grew up with. Will they be curious about what it used to be like, or sick of us old fogies obsessing over how things used to be? Will those of us who remember things being different feel moved to tell stories about it? What stories will we tell? Will it be sort of like how I grew up with stories of the Great Depression? Or will we all just forget what it used to be like, and live with the way things are in the moment?

The Bundesrat is Germany’s Senate, and it’s different from the US Senate in a number of significant ways. Like the US Senate however, it has a couple of very important purposes:

1. Provide a voice for state-level considerations, and a way for less-populous states to not get drowned out by more populous ones.
2. Have an Upper House of the Legislature that has slightly lower reelection pressures and members somewhat less likely to get caught up in short-lived/radical fads, who can thus serve as a check on the potentially rowdier Lower House.

The US has slightly weakened item #2, as Senators are now directly elected (they weren’t originally). But they still have much longer terms than the House, and only a portion of the Senate is up for election every 2 years.

Degressive Proportionality

One can argue about whether a state-level voice is appropriate anymore, but I am not getting into that. I’m willing to accept that states may have particular interests and that society may therefore decide that the vote of someone in a small state should have more power than mine in California. The question is, how much more power should a resident of a less-populous state have?

In the US, Wyoming is our least-populous state, with 578,000 people. California is the most populous, with 39,560,000 people. We both get two Senators. Put differently, individual Californians get one sixty-eighth (1/68) the representation of individual Wyomingites in the Senate. I am fine with Wyomingites having a vote that counts more than mine, but one person having 68x more powerful a vote than another is just too much.

And by the way, this is also an issue in the House, even though it’s supposed to be proportional. California has 53 Representatives, which is 746,000 people per representative. Wyoming gets the minimum of one representative, who represents their 578,000 people. So even in the House, Wyomingites get 1.3x the representation of Californians, on a per-person basis.

But back to the Bundesrat. It uses representation with degressive proportionality to give less-populous states greater voice, but not such an outsize role as in the US. Every state gets between 3 and 6 seats, depending on population:

• 3 seats if population < 2 million
• 4 seats if between 2 & 6 million
• 5 seats if between 6 & 7 million
• 6 seats if population over 7 million

The result is that representation ranges from 224,000 residents per seat in Bremen, to almost 3 million residents per seat in North Rhine-Westphalia (Wikipedia). In other words, Bremen voters have 13x more of a voice in the Bundesrat than North Rhine-Westphalia voters. It’s a significant boost – but it’s not 68x. I think it’s more fair, as it prevents both individual large states and groups of small states from dominating the Bundesrat.

For any math nerds who want to think about the optimal extra voice that residents of smaller states should get, here is some interesting reading on the subject.

Unlike in the US Electoral College, there is no role for state-specific representation in the election of the Chancellor. That is done by the proportionally-elected Bundestag.

Other Differences

The Bundesrat members are not elected. Instead, the state Governor-equivalent (usually referred to as a “Minister President”) automatically serves in the Bundesrat. Other seats are generally filled by state cabinet members. The individual members from a given state delegation don’t have autonomy, however. They must vote as a bloc. And if just the Minister President shows up, that’s fine – he/she/they can just say how the entire state delegation votes, and that’s it.

As a result, Bundesrat members are generally less focused on national or international politics, and more pragmatically/bureaucratically focused on how the legislation in question will impact their home states in practice. If a proposal brings home pork, great. If it’s infeasible to implement, bad news. If it limits state rights, they can get very fussy. For example, for the legislation authorizing e-scooters, the Bundesrat was mostly just concerned about the issue of sidewalk riding. They absolutely did not want a bunch of wild young scooter riders terrorizing elderly and disabled citizens on the sidewalk – that results in a lot of angry constituents. But just about every other issue in the legislation was basically unimportant to them.

Another consequence of the appointment process is that the makeup of the Bundesrat changes every time there is a state Legislature election. State elections occur generally every 5 years, with the 16 different states staggered so they don’t vote all at once. The Bundesrat makeup is thus continually changing, but is always consistent with state level representation. I don’t know that this is better or worse than the US system, it just is.

Finally, the Bundesrat has less power than the US Senate. While the Senate can initiate its own legislation (except for budgets, which the House always initiates), the Bundesrat can only respond to legislation passed by the Bundestag (lower house). It can request changes and reject legislation, but it can’t introduce brand new legislation. Given that the members of the Bundesrat already have full-time jobs running their home states, that’s probably a good thing. Again, whether this is good or bad I don’t know. It seems to function fine, though sometimes I think the Bundesrat has a bit of an inferiority complex (“we really are important, we promise!”).

Still, I do see the Bundesrat serve as a brake on the Bundestag (like in my scooter example), so it seems they’re serving their function. And since there is no executive to serve as a check on the Bundestag in the parliamentary system (the governing coalition is always aligned with the Chancellor), it’s good that the Bundesrat is there as a check on the Bundestag.

Having lived in both the US and Germany, I’ve felt that the German government just functions better. Some of that is likely due to Germany being a smaller and more homogeneous country. But I think they also have a better constitution (sorry, U.S. founders…). Let’s start with the German equivalent to the House of Representatives – the Bundestag. I don’t promise to get all the details just right, but I’ll do my best.

The Bundestag is the German Legislature, their lower house. The Bundestag passes laws, which then go to the Bundesrat (equivalent to the U.S. Senate, the upper house) for modification/approval. Technically the President can veto legislation – but only if they think it is unconstitutional.

The Bundestag also elects other members of government. Along with additional representatives from each state, it elects the (mostly-ceremonial) President every five years. It also elects the Chancellor (equivalent to a Prime Minister – that’s Angela Merkel). Half the members of the Supreme Court are also elected by the Bundestag – that vote requires a 2/3 majority, in order to encourage more centrist choices.

Elections to the Bundestag happen every four years. Typically 3-6 parties make it in, and they negotiate a coalition government (the standard thing for parliamentary systems). Right now there are 6 parties in the Bundestag, and a “Grand Coalition” between center right (Merkel’s party) and center left (the junior partner in the coalition, because they won way fewer seats).

Bundestag elections are different from US House elections in several important ways. I’ll focus on the electoral system in this post, because I think it is the most important area of difference between the Bundestag and the House of Representatives.

Before I get started, I’ll just note some of the things I want to see in an election for the lower chamber of a legislature:

• Give everyone a vote of equal power
• Allow for representation that is nuanced, not just black & white
• Promote less frothy/grandstanding, and more problem-solving behavior by members
• Allow for viewpoints held by a reasonably-sized minority to be voiced in the government and influence mainstream political dialogue
• Ways for less privileged and/or less politically charismatic people to become a member

How Elections Work

Most importantly, every German gets two House votes per election – the first one for their district representative (“direct mandate”), and the second one for the party of their choice (“list mandate”).

There are 299 district representatives, and they are elected similar to most US representatives (except California, where we’ve adopted ranked-choice voting, yeah!!) – one local candidate from each party can run, and whichever one gets a plurality of votes in a district wins.

There are also 299 or more party delegates that are elected via the “party list” vote. Parties publish their lists of candidates ahead of time, and each voter votes for one party (e.g., I would vote “Green Party”). Seats are assigned based on the popular vote across the entire country, such that the overall composition of the Bundestag by party (including direct mandate seats) matches the popular list vote.

Some tricky bits:

1. If a party fails to get more than 5% of the party list votes, it doesn’t get any seats assigned – this is to keep out fringe groups like the Nazi Party.
2. People can run for election both as direct candidates and as list members. If they get elected as a direct candidate, their name just gets crossed off the list, since they’re already in.
3. If letting in only 299 list members means that a party gets more direct seats than its share of the popular vote would have dictated, the other parties get extra seats so that the overall composition is correct. As a result, there may be well over 299 members of the Bundestag elected via the list mandate (on top of the exactly 299 who get in via direct mandate).
   • For example, if the Conservative party gets 150 direct mandate seats in the Bundestag, that’s 150/598 = 25% of the Bundestag at its minimum size, just from their direct seats. But if they only got 20% of the party vote, then the size of the Bundestag needs to be increased to 750, so that they have 150/750 = 20% of all seats. Those extra seats would go to other parties that were underrepresented in the direct mandates, relative to their share of the party mandates, so that every party’s share of seats reflects its share of the popular vote. (FYI: My round-numbers example is pretty extreme – 50% of the direct mandate seats, but only 20% of the list vote.)

Tricky item #3 happens all the time, when people elect somebody they trust and who has represented them for many years with their direct mandate, but then vote for a different party with their list vote, because actually they agree more with the other party’s overall platform. Or maybe they want to shake things up locally via a right-wing direct vote, but still keep Merkel in charge via a conservative list vote. As a result, the Bundestag can have up to 800 members (which admittedly sounds a little unwieldy, but seems to work).

In Germany’s 2017 Bundestag election (results above), you can see how the yellow party (FDP) won zero direct mandate seats, but with 10.7% of the party vote they got 80 party mandate seats. Nationalist AfD (blue) did even better in the party vote, despite only winning 3 direct mandate seats. Meanwhile CSU got zero and CDU got hardly any party mandate seats, because they got a very high number of direct mandate seats but not such a high share of the party vote (probably due to people voting for those other two parties). Fringe parties like the joke/protest party Die PARTEI and the animal protection party didn’t make the cut.

Impacts of the German electoral system

The electoral process I described is complicated and wonky. But it has real, positive impacts.

The Bundestag reflects the people’s preferences

A true popular vote

The Bundestag’s overall party composition is directly dictated by the popular vote by party. What a concept!

There is essentially no incentive to gerrymander. Sure, one representative’s seat may be safe, but winning more direct seats won’t give you any larger of a governing majority after the party vote is factored in, so there’s not much point. For comparison, in the last US election, FiveThirtyEight forecast that Democrats would need to get 55.6% of the popular vote just to get 50% of House seats.

While the U.S. founders wanted to avoid political parties, the reality is that we have them, and that they are the primary organizations for setting overarching political agendas. The legislature is tasked with implementing a political agenda, so I appreciate that in Germany the legislature’s makeup reflects the mix of political agendas each citizen prefers, on a one-citizen-one-vote basis, rather than on a weird gerrymandered basis. I think this better reflects the actual will of the people, rather than the will of whomever is in power and gets to draw the lines.

Multiple parties, with more representative platforms

By having a dual vote, Germany allows the mix of represented agendas to also include those of medium-sized parties that couldn’t otherwise make it into the Bundestag. While fringe parties that get less than 5% of the popular list vote are excluded, everybody else gets in – even if they are too small to win a single direct seat.

For example, I would love to be able to vote for both Nancy Pelosi and a (reformed and actually viable) Green Party. But I can’t do that in the US – there’s no way a Green candidate could or should beat Nancy Pelosi. So we end up with only Democrats and Republicans, and that’s it. This can leave us stuck supporting partisanship and platforms we take serious issue with, without good alternatives (e.g., if you’re a Republican who doesn’t like Trumpism… what do you do?).

In contrast, Germany has a half-dozen parties big enough to enter the Bundestag. This allows for more nuanced party platforms that more accurately represent what their members want. For example, the center-left party can focus more on labor issues, and be somewhat green but not strongly so, while the Green Party can focus on climate change and gender issues, but less so on labor.

Imagine, for example, that instead of Trump taking over the Republican party, that a new party had developed. The Republican party could have stayed as the establishment party with more traditional conservatives, and the new party could have been the home of a more extremist/populist/anti-immigrant/nationalist movement. That is exactly what happened in Germany. The new nationalist party is winning lots of seats, and is able to very directly voice the concerns of its constituency, as you would expect in a representative democracy. It says lots of inflammatory anti-immigrant things and challenges existing conventions around third-rail topics like Holocaust remembrance. But it hasn’t taken over the Conservative party of Angela Merkel, and it’s not a part of the governing coalition, because actually only a minority of people (whether in Germany or the US) share the party’s views.

Having multiple parties also results in a slightly less religious approach to partisanship. Some parties are more aligned than others, but the alignments do shift. It’s quite normal for someone to be undecided as to whether they want to vote center-right vs. center-left, center vs. far left, green vs. far left, etc. While there’s basically zero overlap between green and nationalist party members, I’d bet there is some between far left & nationalist. So while liberals demonize the nationalist party just like Democrats demonize the Republican party (and vice versa), there’s less demonization across all the other parties, and more understanding that sometimes there are just differences in priority/focus.

You can see these shifting alliances in the governing coalitions, too. State-level elections show a diversity of coalitions in state legislatures, with some combinations that are hard to imagine happening in the US:

• Center Right + Green
• Center Left + Green
• Center Right + Center Left
• Center Right + Center Left + Green
• Center Right + Libertarian
• Center Right + Libertarian + Green
• Center Left + Libertarian + Green
• Center Left + Green + Left

Local needs addressed

At the same time as the overall composition of the Bundestag is determined by party, every district still gets to elect someone to advocate specifically for their needs, to bring home the pork, etc. For example, Berlin has Green Party representatives who advocate for improved local bike infrastructure. There are also a handful of local mandate representatives with no party affiliation. With the dual vote, people can separate local advocacy from broader party platform issues if they wish.

I do prefer California’s ranked-choice system to a plurality vote (I think it’s more representative of the majority will), but maybe that would be *too* crazy in Germany? Then they’d have to vote for their top 2 or 3 candidates, plus their preferred party. I’d love it, but I might not be typical 😉

Room for more diversity, skills, and moderation

If a major party really wants to be sure someone gets into the Bundestag, they can just put them high on the party list. Party leaders can be assured of entry into the Bundestag this way, but others can also get in via the list vote.

The Green Party has a rule that the list always begins with a woman, and then alternates between women and men. So even if women don’t win as many direct seats, they will get added in as party delegates. Barring the tricky situation mentioned above, this means the Greens end up with ~50% women in their parliamentary delegation, every election. They are also developing recommendations for other ways to integrate diversity into party structures and decision-making, and will be voting on new rules later this year.

Different parties have different rules for how they create their list of people. Candidates may be up and coming leader types, but they might also be policy wonks with expertise in something important; because the Bundestag is relatively large, it can get more into policy details than US politicians generally do.

List candidates might not be the best campaigners, or the most charismatic leaders. They don’t need to be super partisan and work people into a froth to get them excited enough to vote for them. Yet because of the list vote they can still make it into the Bundestag, where they can do useful things.

I’m really not sure how parties select which people exactly end up on the list. I think some allow members to vote only for party leaders, who then select list members; others may allow for more direct voting by members.

More ability to focus on getting work done

Once in the Bundestag, members also have more freedom. In the US today, if a representative isn’t sufficiently “pure” for the more partisan members of their district, they risk a primary challenge and/or lack of enthusiasm for their reelection campaign.

In Germany, these pressures also exist. However, the list provides an alternative to the direct vote that doesn’t depend on any local purity tests (though the member needs to stay in the good graces of the party as a whole). And with elections once every four years instead of once every two years, members don’t have to continually campaign to keep their seats.

<Bryan rant on> Let me start by giving an unconventional answer. As I travel, I hear many people talk about how places are very different. Germans are efficient and socialist or Americans are materialistic and capitalist. They give supporting anecdotes and stories.

This kind of answer doesn’t represent how I experience the world. I’ve been very lucky to travel all over. The world is quite connected and shares similar lifestyles in many ways. See how families with an income over $2000 a month live around the world on Dollar Street, for example. Many facets of life are immediately familiar anywhere.

I want to practice giving our shared humanity the weight it deserves, while acknowledging our differences. I think this is more representative.

So with that in mind, I’ll dive into more about life in Berlin so far and how it’s like. <Bryan rant off>

<Joanna comment on> Bryan wrote this post. I don’t entirely share his impressions, and I attend more to the differences than Bryan does. But that’s just our respective natures! <Joanna comment off>

Language

Before I arrived in Berlin, Joanna and other friends said it would be possible to get by with English. This is technically true — several friends who’ve been here for 6+ years don’t speak much German and it works for them. There are many English-speaking native Germans and expats, especially in downtown (Mitte).

Within an hour of landing here though, I felt that German is the primary language for business, bureaucracy, and life. It takes work to use anything else. Many cultural events and exhibits are only in German. Plus, although many Germans learned English in school growing up, very few older Germans seem at ease discussing complex topics in English, unless they lived or worked in an English place. So not knowing German feels limiting.

This motivated me to learn more German! I used SmarterGerman, which teaches a broad set of skills using modern methods (minimal memorizing!). It’s been quite helpful, along with having a fluent life partner 🙂 Now I can often participate in basic conversations. I made it back in one piece on a couple of solo weekend trips, without Joanna.

It’s been an interesting experience and helpful to imagine what living in San Francisco without English might be like. Probably similar and even harder to get by, except for some government services available in multiple languages. Also it’s been fun to see how close or far away our smartphone apps are from a Babelfish. We’ve come a long way since I travelled the Southern Hemisphere in 2012, but there’s a long way to go.

Bureaucracy

Joanna and I have worked our way through a good deal of bureaucracy in Berlin. It’s been tolerable. A few bureaucrats have been fussy, but usually we’ve had friendly people, intent on applying rules in a sensible way, with reasonable wiggle room. We’ve heard it’s harder for people who don’t come from USA / Canada, with our professional background.

Bureaucracy was generally in German only. Thankfully, I had Joanna to help, and all I had to give was snuggles and back rubs. The most important step was the Anmeldung (residence registration) once we had a rental apartment. So many other steps depend on this.

Basically it felt like the bureaucratic experience when I moved to the US for college, except everything in the US depends on getting a Social Security Number. It was also interesting to consider how each system marginalized some people.

Groceries

Buying groceries in Berlin is a lot like SF, down to the impulse candy buys before checkout.

The first time I went shopping alone, without Joanna, it took me an hour and a half to buy ten things. I had to learn enough German to figure the different grades of wheat flour and which one to use. A week later, once I’d learned how to map English brands and item names to German ones, I felt at home. The grocery has most of the same kinds of things, organized in the same sections, and sold in the same ways.

There are some differences too. Stores in SF stock a much bigger Kombucha shelf. Berlin groceries have more tasty cheese and sausage. The fruit and vegetable selection in Berlin is a bit more seasonal and local, but there’s often fruit flown in from South America. And it’s much harder to find bean-to-bar chocolate in Berlin.

Also, there are no big-box organic groceries in Berlin. At our neighbourhood favourite, the LPG Biomarkt, you get to chose between three or four kinds of eggs, depending on what’s available. When we were back in SF in September, the Whole Foods was shockingly large. Disorienting almost! The egg section there takes up as much space as the entire dairy section at LPG:

Getting Around

While San Francisco is one of the better places for walking, biking, and transit in the US, getting around in Berlin feels noticeably faster, safer, and less car-centric.

First, Berlin has a historical advantage: density. Since the late 1800s, over a million people have lived in the central core. All the buildings in the core are six stories or more, with lots of shops and offices mixed in with homes. Only a few neighborhoods in SF like Russian Hill and the Mission approach this level of density. Very few have as much mixed use. This means that in Berlin, there are more people, services, and cultural opportunities in a smaller area. Things are just closer, no matter how you get there.

For virtually all trips in the city of Berlin under half an hour, Joanna and I bike. While San Francisco has an admirable network of bike corridors like the fun Wiggle, Berlin’s is denser, with physically separate bike lanes, bike-only traffic signals. Add in the lack of hills in Berlin, and biking feels a lot easier than in San Francisco.

When we’re not on bike, the public transit is also a step up. San Francisco has reasonable transit — I used Caltrain daily for commuting and BART often to go to East Bay, but compared to Berlin, it’s slow, infrequent, and has spotty coverage. In the central core in Berlin (inside the Ringbahn), you can go from anywhere to anywhere in half an hour or less. Usually only a few minutes slower than by car or bike. Plus subways come every 3 minutes, not 15 like the BART or an hour between Caltrains. It takes much less thinking.

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For longer trips, there is a dense train network. Travel time often approaches or beats flying or driving, with much better comfort. In California, I rode the Coast Starlight from Disneyland to San Jose once and it took 12 hours to go 360 miles. This is not practical. In Germany, the fast train from Berlin to Munich goes a similar distance in under 4 hours. This was a wonderful way to see the Alps or meet up with friends in the south.

One thing both places share is a focus on cars. Cars, parking, roadways, traffic, pollution, and noise are pervasive around Berlin almost as much as in San Francisco. Even though public transit and biking work well for me personally, in a 2015 study, a plurality of Berliners (37%) got around daily by car. An even larger fraction (45%) preferred to use the car as the primary mode of transportation. It’s been nice to hear about a car-free Market St in SF from afar. Car-free zones in Berlin are coming but stalled in trial projects.

Transportation works in both places, but it just works better in Germany. The historical advantages in land use and infrastructure that make this possible will take many decades for California to catch up on.

WILDERNESS

While we’ve been here in Germany, it’s been wonderful to wander the lakes and forests around Berlin, hang out in beautiful urban parks in the city, explore the canals and rivers, and visit a few spectacular national parks. There’s plenty of thoughtfully preserved nature here. Fall colours are beautiful all over, compared to a few choice spots in California. Walking on the beach in Jasmund National Park on the Baltic Sea reminded me very much of hiking the Lost Coast in California — waves rolling onto a cliff-side beach for miles and miles.

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However, I miss the wilderness in California. There is nothing like it here. Even in the national parks, it’s hard to avoid running into centuries of intensive land use: farms, towns, roads, trains, boats, and airplanes. This has benefits, like stopping at a cafe for tasty Apple cake mid-hike. But, it’s hard to have the same level disconnection from human influence.

Germany is working to improve, but only 0.6% of the country is protected wilderness. This is a far cry from 15% of California designated as wilderness, and over 47% as protected public land of some kind. Just as Germany has a historical legacy of better transportation infrastructure, California has a noticeably stronger legacy of wilderness protection.

In Short…

In my day to day life here, I feel like many things are quite similar in general. It took a few weeks to pick up enough German, setup a foundation, and shift habits slightly. The only thing that’s been harder to adjust to is that most of my friends and community are back in the States.

More Berlin impressions to come in a future post on things like entertainment, gender roles, nudity, children, housing, homelessness, pace of life, smoking, tech, dim sum, and more. Maybe also what the alternate-universe German Joanna is like compared to California Joanna?