He takes a rag from his pocket and carefully wipes the last day’s accumulation of snow from the plaque. The old parking lot nearby, and even the parts of the sidewalk that haven’t been shoveled are covered in inches of snow. But the memorial has barely any, even before he begins his work. He has been here every day, making sure these words can be read, though he knows that no one else will read them today. Everyone passes with their shoulders tense against the cold and their eyes scanning the sidewalk for treacherous bits of ice. That doesn’t matter to him.

When he goes, the flakes immediately begin re-whitening the brass surface. An hour later the letters have vanished; but he will be back tomorrow.

This has fairly widely been dubbed the most boring election in history. Which — aren’t we in the middle of the biggest recession since the Great Depression? Wasn’t there a gigantic financial crises this time last year, technically on Merkel’s watch? Shouldn’t there be a revolution or something (and come on, 12 percent for the Linke, the former East German state party, now a left opposition, doesn’t count)?

It’s astonishing how badly the left has come out of this crisis. It’s not that the right has fantastic ideas; certainly not in the States, where they’ve collapsed into sputtering brain-fevered monosyllables. But there is no coherent alternative to centrism today. Everyone is spending like mad, in a Keynesian approach to the post-Friedman global economy. Angie’s social market economy is not radically different from what Obama wants to do the States; and here, because she’s staked out that centrist ground, she wins.

Her new partners, the liberals, want tax cuts. Maybe they’ll get some, but Germany is awash in debt, at least by its standards, and if George W. Bush has shown anything, it is that shotgun-targeted tax cuts don’t produce anything but pain and messes that have to be cleaned up later. Not much room to maneuver in that respect.

So where is the coherent left? Certainly not in Germany. Or in France. Even socialist Sweden has a center-right government. There are good ideas coming from the left, like New Deal-type spending on green technology; but this can be adopted just as well by the center-right, and will, by Merkel.

We need a new labor movement; something that reflects the realities of today’s economy. Something that represents, or is grounded in, the interests of deliberately mobile, flexible workers. Freelancers and contractors, programmers and writers and service types. Based on an economics that understands that people aren’t rational, that the free market fails miserably in many areas (but actually does work pretty well in others), and doesn’t let finance types assure the world that they’re getting hugely rich because what they’re doing is really, really good for everybody.

Four hundred lei to the bus station, the driver suggests. No meters. We do the math. It comes out somewhere north of $125. This seems high. Absurd, we say. We’ll take the bus.

“It is very far. At least 40 kilometers,” the taxi diver says. We have no idea where the station is, as it was unfindable on Google maps. He might be right.  Yet the rate on the door says it is only 1.9 lei (about 64 cents) per kilometer. I point this out.

“Oh, no,” He shakes his head. His mustache bristles with authority. “In town only. Two hundred lei.”

We’ll take the bus, we say. Assuming there is a bus. He counteroffers. 100 lei to the Gara de Nord train station. We don’t know where that is either, but assume it must be a very long way away. A good part of the extraordinarily long distance to the bus station, at least. We agree, feeling our time vanishing.

“OK,” he says, disgusted. “But not with me.” He gets out of his cab, finds a colleague, and we transfer our bags. The new driver takes us four kilometers before pulling into the train station. I seethe. I have been counting. I do not like flying, it makes me nervous in the air and then angry when I hit the ground. It is not my most winning characteristic.

“Four kilometers!” I say. “Four only!”

“Yes. No. 100 Lei,” the driver says. He is not aggressive, but is clearly bracing himself for the argument. His English is not good. We swap numbers. Four. 100. Four only. 100. We are getting nowhere. Our first bus, from somewhere near this train station, leaves in 10 minutes, and all we have in our pockets are 100 lei bills. It is a losing argument. We pay. I am surly.

There are no signs indicating a bus station is nearby. We walk back along the street we had come, toward buses I have seen in a parking lot. We ask a water vendor, and he points us in the other direction, chattering in Romanian that we cannot understand. We walk in that direction for a few blocks, ask at a hotel, and they know nothing. We walk back to the buses I had seen, and this turns out to be a bus station but not the one we’re looking for. We walk back the other direction again, farther this time, and ask a clothing vendor who turns out to speak German. He consults with a friend and points us in a third direction.

It is very late now, and when we get to where they have pointed us, there is an empty minibus station, and a collection of very hot wild dogs lying in what little shade they can find. We are also very hot. I am dripping.

We finally find a public bus system, which for 1.30 lei (about 40 cents) apiece takes us to the bus station we originally wanted, which is not 40 kilometers away but is also not marked, and which we overshoot by several stops. But once found, our bus is there, with an dried apple-faced bus driver who speaks no English or German but is extraordinarily friendly and guides us to our seat, and we are going to Transylvania at last.

He pulls his head back inside, throwing the car into reverse. A minute later the car lurches forward, and the brakes squeal a second time. Again the young man leans out the window and shouts until tangling himself in his own cursing. The little audience gathered outside the coffee house laughs and claps appreciatively, and the actor turns to give them a sly smile.

Inside, the regular is delighted. “I used to see this in New Zealand. Two cars race up to a stoplight right next to each other, like this, you know?” His hands mime the cars’ sudden stop. “Guy gets out of one and the other driver, the idiot, rolls down his window. First one punches him right in the face, and then gets back in his car and drives off.”

Laughs all around. “That was a movie?” somebody asks.

“No, no, that was real.”

Another right-winger march happened yesterday in Lichtenberg (a relatively poor eastern neighborhood known for its right-leaning tendencies). This time the numbers were more daunting. According to the Morgenpost, about 750 marchers (ie, neo-Nazi types) showed up, with about 700 protestors. Naturally police presence was high, with 1600 cops on the beat. Bottles were thrown, and somewhere around 70 people arrested, from both sides.

That’s a lot of marchers. Berlin is overwhelmingly liberal, even left-wing, with a fabulous gay mayor and anti-Nazi stickers and graffiti everywhere. It’s never going to fall too far to the right. But economic dislocation could well swell the extreme fringes on both sides. That hasn’t worked out well here in the past.

We stopped by today. I shouldn’t have worried. It’s brilliant, shedding light on Giacometti in ways I would likely never have noticed on my own. He was apparently entranced by Egyptian art, spending long periods of time studying and sketching ancient sculpture. The collection shows books that had belonged to him, with his own versions of pieces sketched in next to pictures of the originals.

The exhibition works in much the same way, placing a dozen or so of his sculptures next to pieces of a genre that served as obvious models, or inspiration. Tall, eerie striding man next to a classic Egyptian walking man with one leg outstretched, portrait busts that shared structure (and almost the same foreheads), twisted beautiful figures that display feeling and personality in stylized form.

Well worth the visit, particularly on a free museum day.

I’m only beginning to understand Egyptian sculpture, thanks to a visit to the Met last summer. I’d always loved Greek and the best of the Roman (Romans copied dreadfully, but they also gave real personality to what in Greece was often simply beautiful). But even thousands of years before the Greeks, the Egyptians were creating busts and full statues of stunning, almost frighteningly realistic personality. In the Altes, Nefertiti’s head gets all the press, but a little piece called the Green Head is far better — a stone head of a priest, I think, that expresses force and power and personhood in every expert line.

Seen at Bonanza Coffee Heroes, where they make a rich, flavorful brew with geopolitical relevance.

Americans: If you haven’t voted already, send that ballot in now!

(Cross-posted at Hungry in Berlin.)

MIAMI — Move over, Al Gore. You may lay claim to the Internet, but John McCain helped create the BlackBerry.

At least that’s the contention of a top McCain policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Waving his BlackBerry personal digital assistant and citing McCain’s work as a senator, he told reporters Tuesday, “You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create.”

There are many things to be said about this. But aside from simply being high on the idiot scale, it misses a fairly obvious point. The Blackberry is Canadian, created by Ontario’s Research in Motion.

Reminds me of the (I think) French ambassador’s comment after the whole “Freedom fries” incident: “Actually,” he said. “They’re Belgian.”

But last night, against all odds, we actually ventured outside to this event being thrown by a few dozen B-list clubs across the city, one ticket gets you in all of them, dance to your heart’s content. It’s the first time Peasant Glasses and I have been to any Berlin dance clubs except our friendly local Icon, and so naturally we excitedly started at the old-person’s hour of 11, when everything was deserted. The first few were a bust for me; I never liked high school dances, and have zero nostalgia for the disco of the 70s and radio hits of the 80s. But just in time, we found a group of crazy Romanian DJs playing some kind of hard bass-heavy electronic goodness, two in giant cardboard robot costumes, another laying down live sax squeals over the beats. I dug. Dancing is a collective ecstasy; it’s hard for me to transcend my own inclination to simply nod my head and analyze the music, but it’s a beautiful thing when it happens.

On the way home, we stopped to watch a pair of blackbirds battle-rapping at 4 am, sitting on opposite sides of a long vacant stretch where the Wall used to run, alternating complex and creative stretches of song at the top of their lungs. The sound echoed from the sides of the apartments, lit up the pre-dawn streets like fireworks, made us grin.

Winter’s over, finally.

So, now that nobody’s kicking me out of the country, it’s time to figure out what to do with the time.