That forces people from different disciplines to talk to each other. At the university we met the other graduate student who was responsible for organizing the conference. While they were charming and very bright, they had too little experience organizing conferences. It was not a big deal for me, but still this is something that would normally not happen to experienced organizers, especially when there was no fee attached to the speaking invitation. During the first four days I went site seeing.
Central Berlin looks like a construction site.
There are hundreds of construction cranes. It looks like every multinational corporation in the world wants to have offices near Potsdamer Platz. At the center is Humbolt University, which at one point in the 1920s had 20 Nobel Prize professors. The museums were wonderful. The Islamic museum was organized by period, so you got a sense of the evolution of Islamic art.