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The tram today is very crowded.  I guess my age is starting to show as someone quickly offers their seat to me.  Such behavior is common here as Poles are very polite.  Cars here will readily stop for people to cross the street – we see as well in northern Maine, but Szczecin is a city with a population of 400,000.  Poles when they see a colleague for the first time that day shake hands.  The Polish Dziękuję (thank you) and Prosę (please, or you are welcome) are perhaps the most spoken words in Poland.

I am a little more than midway through the Fulbright and am due for having the teeth cleaned.  An appointment is easily made for the next day – there are long waits in the US – and the cleaning costs 120 Złoty (about $30).  Szczecin has many good dentists, as Germans will commonly come to Poland have less expensive dental work.

I attended a choir honoring the “three wise men” holiday that marks the end of the Christmas season, in the St. Jakub Cathedral, which is the biggest and probably oldest church in Szczecin.  However, you will notice that the brickwork here is very new.  This church was badly damaged during the war.  The acoustics are very good, as is of course a characteristic of all the old churches.

Snow (sneig) has fallen.  This is at the tram station near my apartment.  Not much snow falls here – the locals say there used to be much more.

I am now back in Szczecin, and back to work among my silicoflagellates.  To start off the second half of my Fulbright photo-blog, I have here a very rare silicoflagellate:  perhaps the oldest known double skeleton.  This is Vallacerta hannai, and comes from the Cretaceous of Russia.  The specimen was found by David Harwood, but I was sitting next to him when he found it.

The bus driver who takes me from Berlin back to Szczecin wants a picture of “the brother of Paul McCartney.”  I am not sure if he appreciates that my brother Paul is not the musician, but no matter, we pose for the picture.  I also include a picture of the bus.  The bases are also efficient and surprisingly inexpensive in Poland.  This trip costs 50 Złoty, or about $12.  I have no idea who they can make money at this rate.

The Berlin-Tagel Airport is half-way between Ulan Bator (Mongolia) and New York City (US).

I love European bakeries.  In Budapest to Vienna we found mostly cakes in the bakeries, but in Berlin we finally find what I have been looking for:  European pastries!  What we in the US generally call donuts appears to be more of a western-European thing.  But in this display is an “Amerikaner” donut.  I buy one but find this to be like nothing I have seen in America.  So why the name?  After some thought, I have the answer: this is Berlin joke.  John F. Kennedy, when he visited the Berlin Wall in 1963 said “Ich bin ein Berliner” which literally means “I am a jelly donut” since that is what a “Berliner” means in German  (I am from Berlin would be “Ich bin Berlin”).  So, among the Berliner donuts, this bakery has an “Amerikaner”!

We have arrived in Berlin for a night before Kate returns to the US and I to Szczecin.  Here we have a final dinner, for a while, at a microbrewery restaurant.  I have a very good (11% alcohol) dark beer with sausages and sauerkraut while has Berlin-meatballs, which are quite good.

We are enroute from Bratislawa, Slovakia to Praha (Prague), Chech Republic (also known as Chechia) on board a train.  We very seldom travel on board trains in the US, but travel in Europe shows that this can be done with surprising efficiency.  On this trip, we sat next to a little area where children could watch videos for entertainment, and is one of the many interesting ideas I see on these trains.  Trains are one of the things that I think we will have to get back to once the predicted oil peak transpires.  I know that airplanes work as mass transportation as well, but trains can actually be powered by electricity while large airplanes cannot.  (You probably do not want to ask me where the electricity [or hydrogen fuel] will have to come from).