All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

The two sides of the wall were like twins who had been separated...and raised in very different environments. To the west, colorful graffiti art, tourists walking up and touching it. To the east, stark white concrete...and armed guards.

But the faces on either side were the same.

On November 9th, 1989, East Germany's communist leaders...under pressure to ease travel restrictions...sent a spokesman to brief reporters on a new policy...allowing travel between East and West in the future. He mistakenly announced the new rules would take effect immediately. Hundreds of thousands descended on the border crossings. And the overwhelmed guards simply lifted the gates.

It would take months for the wall to be demolished...and years for the former soviet republics to build new governments.

But for those reunited with lost brothers, parents and cousins on the other side...it only took a moment to realize no one could build a wall around their hearts.

That's a page from my notebook.

I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.

The Germans gave us the pretzel, the Volkswagen, and the current pope. But that's not all.

Our own Christine Lagorio has been on a fellowship in Berlin for several weeks. This week, in her Letter From Berlin, chronicles some of the more surprising innovations of German ingenuity:

They are little things, but a good deal of the time, in Berlin, they leave me impressed with their simplicity, and sometimes wondering “why don’t we do this in America?”

(CBS / Christine Lagorio)

Example: To enter my small, generally low-tech apartment building, I place a blue stick the size of a pen cap up to a red dot on the wall. The heavy door pops open. To get into my office, I walk into a street-level elevator, place a card on a sensor and it takes me to my floor.

Since coming to Germany, I haven’t seen crowds build up waiting to go through turnstiles for public transportation. To board the U-Bahn, one simply walks into the station, buys a ticket from an automated machine and waits for the train a certain number of minutes, which are displayed on an electronic board. Train doors open when you open them yourself, and close automatically when it is time to go. Quite unlike in the New York subway, here I’ve never interacted with - or even seen - an U-Bahn worker.

Efficiency bonus: When leaving the station, you can approach a still escalator and it will start moving to take you up.

Visit her column for more about life in Germany today.

While New Yorkers are contending with a morning commute nightmare, caused by torrential rain, our own Christine Lagorio has been chronicling her own adventures trying to get out of the country and into Berlin. Her first installment of her Letter from Berlin has just been posted:

It was April when I got notice I had been accepted for a fellowship in Germany – more than 14 weeks before I’d be taking off from Newark to Tegel Airport in Berlin. The State Department’s estimated passport processing time was 10 weeks for standard service. Fine, I thought, plenty of leeway – and I only needed a renewal. I dropped my soon-to-be expired passport in the mail, and bid auf wiedersehen to it for 10 weeks.

But it didn’t return in 10 weeks. Or 11 weeks. Or 12. So I set out to find the little navy blue booklet that would allow me to leave the country.

My trek was mostly virtual – winding from online to phone lines and call centers – but in the end it led me to the very real (though a bit surreal, with all its intense security and vaulted ceilings) State Department headquarters on C Street in Washington, D.C.

More than 12 million Americans get a passport each year. That’s more than 33,000 each day, including Saturdays and Sundays. Now consider that the demand for U.S. passports has roughly doubled in the past decade. Now include everyone who lives in a border town and works, plays or does business in both countries. I didn’t do the exact math, but I figured the odds weren’t on my side.

It did not reassure me when after 12 weeks of waiting I logged into the State Department’s Passport site for the first time. It showed no record of my application.

Anyone who's tried to travel out of the country lately can relate. Check Christine's post for all the details. And check back every week. She'll be posting every Wednesday on her adventures in Germany.

Call it a holiday in Berlin; call it working double-time.

For the next two months, I’ll be reporting from Germany thanks to an Arthur F. Burns foundation fellowship from the International Center for Journalists. I’ll be writing for the Financial Times Deutschland and also filing for CBSNews.com weekly dispatches, billed “Letter from Berlin.” Check them out here on Wednesdays.

Thanks to this amazing opportunity I’m taking a hiatus from editing the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric section of CBSNews.com and have abandoned (for just a while!) my seat next to your esteemed Couric & Co. editor Greg Kandra.

I’m in Washington, D.C., this week undergoing a rigorous and informative slate of daily lunches and seminars on foreign policy, reporting from abroad and U.S.-German relations, and attending one amazing reception at the German Ambassador’s residence. (Most of this learning and networking is fueled by two of my favorite European imports: Riesling and Red Bull.)

I already have stories to share. Stay tuned for: The passport boondoggle.

Auf Weidresehen!