Meanwhile Angela Merkel had a beer and a sauna

According to am English language German site called the Local, while thousands of East Germans surged past the Berlin Wall Angela Merkel visited the sauna and had a beer.

Reminiscing to foreign reporters in Berlin this week, Merkel told how she stuck to her weekly routine as a 35-year-old research scientist even as history was made around her.

"I thought something was going to happen, and had heard the announcement on television that the borders would open...But it was Thursday, and Thursday was my sauna day so that's where I went."

After her steam bath, Merkel went for a beer with a friend and only afterwards, when they left the bar, did they find themselves swept up in the huge crowds thronging Bornholmerstrasse and pouring into the West.

There she met celebrating West Berliners and shared beers with them, before heading home, telling herself "the Wall will still be open in the morning."

The next day, Merkel and her sister made a pilgrimage to the huge KaDeWe department store in the West, a temple of the western consumer society that had everything that was lacking in the East's command economy.

Fair enough! It wasn’t as if the wall would be bricked up again overnight. Still I think I might have changed my routine a little to be in at the death of the Berlin Wall but horses for courses...

Angela Merkel honoured as Barbie doll

It is Barbie’s 50th birthday this year and thanks to plastic surgery (or should that be injection mould technology?) she does not look as if she has aged a day. Strangely (or perhaps not, I don’t know) as part of the celebrations manufacturer, Mattel have seen fit to honour German Chancellor Angela Merkel by turning her into a Barbie doll. (Der Spiegel report here)

The Angela Merkel Barbie Doll made its debut at the 60th annual International Toy Fair in Nuremberg on Thursday. While the hair colour and cut are spot on, as is her respectable black wool crepe trouser suit, complete with pink lining that's pretty much where the similarities end. The Merkel Barbie apparently has a figure closer to that sported by Heidi Klum and perhaps it does not quite do justice to Merkel’s other attributes.....


That said it is far more flattering than her transformation into a caganer, a pooping figurine found in Catalan nativity scenes.


I bet the other EU leaders are jealous of Merkel. I can imagine Sarkozy and Brown would b delighted to be portrayed as Ken. Berlusconi on the other hand has probably had one of his tv stations make a show where he is portrayed as a superhero with a gigantic member....