So I was sharing my impressions of Berlin with some Brits last night, and they both claimed to prefer Berlin over Munich, saying Berlin was edgy and trend-setting and Munich was just traditional. I, of course, prefer Munich to the Berlin I visited (if for only two days). Berlin seemed to me like a big cubist experiment. Everything was either falling into ruins or under construction; Munich, on the other hand, has a well-kept, established city nucleus that promises to remain this way. When I termed Munich cosmopolitan they disagreed with me. But cosmopolitan means "having constituent elements from all over the world or from many different parts of the world," which definitely doesn't fit Berlin from what I saw of it. Maybe it does have the second largest Turkish population behind Istanbul, but otherwise, it's a German stronghold.
Maybe this was just an example of polite disagreement for the purpose of making conversation, or maybe it's an example of extrapolation from too few data points. As they say, you can take a single point and draw any line you want through it.
Posted by Alan at September 1, 2002 11:32 PM