Little-known facts about Angela Merkel

¤ Angela Merkel has said she has no plans to move from the central Berlin apartment where she currently lives with husband Joachim Sauer into the new Chancellery building after she becomes Chancellor.

¤ Having grown up in communist East Germany where Russian was taught as a first foreign language, Ms Merkel speaks good Russian. She is proficient in English.

¤ Asked once in an interview how she would spend three spare days if she could do anything she wanted, she said she would tidy her apartment, putting her book collection in order.

¤ Ms Merkel, 51, considers herself a good cook. Her specialities are soups, schnitzel and fish dishes as well as cake.

¤ Her first political memory is of the Berlin Wall being built in August 1961. Her second is of US President John F. Kennedy being shot.

¤ In the hope of preventing communist East Germany's secret police from listening to their telephone conversations, Ms Merkel's family sometimes put a metal fork next to the receiver - a method whose effectiveness she says she always doubted.

¤ Ms Merkel's family always joked that if the Berlin Wall fell, they would go and eat oysters in West Berlin's fancy Kempinski hotel. But after learning in November 1989 that the Wall had been breached, she went to the sauna with a friend, as she did every week.

¤ In 1987, Ms Merkel, a physicist, co-authored an article called Non-empirical Parameter Estimate For The Statistical Adiabatic Theory Of Unimolecular Fragmentation Carbon-Hydrogen Bond Breaking In Methyl.