Thoughts on Berlin and the German language

Visiting Berlin is always an odd experience for me; I wonder if I had lived in Berlin rather than on the Western side, would I have liked DE more? Visiting there, I see a few things that I find to be universal to DE--old men picking plastic bottles from the garbage bins, students trying to hustle a place on someone's weekend group travel ticket, and the same chains like Rossmans, etc.

The part that always baffles me...when I go to Berlin (and anywhere else in DE) I attempt to live the culture and rough it out in German. In Cologne (near where I was), the constant irritation was that people would switch to poor English, even when my German was passable. I ended up in plently of conversations where the German person was speaking to me in passable English and I was responding in passable German. Back and forth we went, German/English/German/English.

In Berlin, no one ever switches to English with me, we carry on in German. In some ways, this slightly baffles me, as a major city where they get plently of English visitors and obviously English skills are there, why they don't automatically switch over like they do in Koeln.

One theory: my crappy German is an unfamiliar blend in Berlin. In Koeln there are certain words, phrases, and styles of speaking, and a local can pick out an English speaker after very few words. So there is less hesitation to convert to English, because one knows quite clearly that someone is an English speaker.

A colleague had once mentioned to me that it was clear that I had my 'German education' in the Koeln/D'dorf region, just from the words and sentence constructions and speaking style that I used...

A second theory: Another (Cologne based) German colleague had mentioned--the German mentality is that the best foreign speaker should automatically yield. So if a German speaking English and an American speaking German get together, whoever is the better speaker dictates the language of conversation. Often, the Germans speak better English than the English speakers' German. Therefore, the language conversation should be English in these instances. If a super foreign speaker of German is with the German group, then the conversation flow should be in German.

I was at a business meeting at the Ritz Carlton last week. Since it was the Ritz, I was curious to see how good their English was, so when I needed directions to a DM or Rossmans, I asked in English. I thanked her in German and she answered me in German and then looked at me, as if surprised that she had just slipped into German. Their English is of course, quite good, but it seems very 'school-ish' rather than having any actual expereience.