For those who want to see where I arrived yesterday

[Mira]

the last 2 photos will definitely give it away.

[elleng]

1. Gute Reise!

[Solly Mack]

2. I miss menus in the window/door!

Hope you're having a wonderful time!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. What a wonderful place to go to, my dear Mira!

Forgive my forgetfulness but aren't you from there? Or somewhere nearby? Sorry I don't remember.

Your pictures are beautiful, of course.

More, please!

[Major Nikon]

4. Youre a jelly doughnut!

[Mira]

9. Not too many know

what "Ich bin ein Berliner" really meant.

[dixiegrrrrl]

11. It must have been so painful to families who lost family over that wall.

So many people died trying to escape, over a wall that was demolished 28 years after it was put up.

And some of us can still remember watching tv news when it went up, and later when it came down.

I am so glad there are reminder pieces of it still standing in places.

[DFW]

17. We can all be happy it wasn't a German visiting the capital of France

Can you imagine "ich bin ein Pariser?"

[Mira]

5. Visiting relatives in 4 countries, getting put up by them

I'm from Augsburg, close to Munich. When my Mom was still living I could not travel around on my trips to Germany. Now I can trace some of my roots - traveling mostly by train. It was something I had long wanted to have a chance to do. And since I can do it on a small budget and can still walk unaided I say to myself: If not now, then when......

Thanks for your encouragement to post more photos.
Chances are quite good I will,

[elleng]

6. Thanks for filling in some details, Mira,

the occasion for a great visit!

[alfredo]

7. Thats either a piece of the wall,

or the monolith from “2001 A Space Odyssey” after a drunken night on the town. Damn that apple wine.

[mnhtnbb]

8. Hope you're having a terrific time.

Looks like glorious weather!

[lunatica]

10. I have a piece of the Berlin Wall!

I have a collection of rocks and a friend gave me a rock size piece of the Berlin Wall with some grafitti on it. It also has a stamp showing the date the Wall came down. It’s cool.

[WinstonSmith4740]

12. Beautiful!

I was there in 1972 when the wall was still up. And the idiots here don't get that the Berlin Wall was originally sold as a way to keep the decadence of the west out.

[DFW]

13. The DDR official expression was "Antifaschistischer Schutzwall"

Anti-Fascist Protection Wall. In all the time it was up, the East Germans never remembered to explain why their machine guns were pointed inward at their own citizens, and not outward at the fictitious hoards of invaders just waiting to storm their ramparts the moment they let their guard down. I used to stare at it--from both sides--and never ceased to be amazed at the very concept.

[WinstonSmith4740]

15. Truly a testament of man's inhumanity to man.

I was in my early 20's at the time, and remember going up on the observation decks they had built so you could look over the wall. I caught the eye of one of the guards on the other side and shot him the peace symbol. He looked around, and surreptitiously shot one back to me under his gun. It was epic. Even the guards realized how evil that thing was. We had a night flight out, and looking down at the city, you could see exactly where the wall was...on one side a vibrant, lit-up city, on the other, complete darkness and desolation.

And I don't even want to think of what it looked like from the East Berlin side. But I do remember West Berlin as being one hell of a good time!

[DFW]

16. I can tell you what it looked like from the East Berlin side

It was a dark and as desolate as you though it was. I was there.

Some of the East German border guards were human, some less so. Occasionally, if they were bored, they would take westerners at random aside at the border crossing, make them empty their pockets and interrogate them. One time, I was with a friend from Holland who was curious about East Berlin, so I took him with me. For a day pass, you were forced to exchange a certain amount of D-marks for East German marks at 1 to 1 (real value was ten to one), and you weren't allowed to take the East German money back. My Dutch friend had no German money (this was, of course, pre-euro), so I paid for both of us, and got handed all the East German money. Sure enough, they took us both aside to interrogate us. I asked my team to tell the team interrogating my Dutch friend that I had paid for both of us, and had the East German marks for both of us. My guys said, not to worry, it was cool. But sure enough, the team interrogating my Dutch friend came in all worked up because he had somehow gotten rid of his East German marks somewhere in the four feet between the exchange line and the rooms where they stuck us to interrogate us. The leader of my team rolled his eyes at me in knowing frustration, told the other team leader that I had paid and had the East marks for both of us. They then let us in.

One time I was with some American friends with whom I had gone to college. They wanted to se an East German college, so we found the Humboldt University and tried to wander onto the campus. W were immediately surrounded by a bunch of student SED Party members who asked us where we were from and what we wanted on their campus. I explained that we had just graduated from our university in the USA, were on vacation, and wanted to see what a university was like in East Germany. They said, no, it was not allowed. Uhh, OK. But being our age (22 at the time), they WERE curious to talk to Americans, something they figured they'd never get to do otherwise. So we had a nice long chat. One of them had to leave early, as he had a Russian language exam. I said a few words to him in Russian, and got a few compliments. A few phone calls must have been made after we left, because sure enough, when the time came to go back to West Berlin, I got pulled out for an interrogation. I was the only one in the room without an East German uniform, a gun, or the right to stand up without permission. The first time, it was very intimidating. After that, I understood the game.

There are several stories I have about East Berlin. They are all very predictable. Watching soldiers parading though East Berlin doing the Nazi-era goose step, wearing (except for their oddball helmets) Wehrmacht-style uniforms was weird, too. Just the other side of that wall was another world.

If you want a realistic view of what life was like there, even to their version of an elite, go see the movie "Das Leben Der Anderen (The Lives of Others)." It deservedly won an Oscar for best foreign film the year after it came out.

As for West Berlin, it was (intentionally) a party town for sure. It cost the West German government (and the USA/GB/France) a fortune to keep the place alive as an island of western Germany inside the East. It took decades, but it paid off. I met my wife in the West Berlin folk music cabaret scene in the summer of 1974. She is from the farm country of Germany extreme northwest, but was doing a year of practical social work in West Berlin as part of her degree in Social Work. We're still together now, living near Düsseldorf.

[WinstonSmith4740]

18. This is fascinating!

It sounds like we were there in approximately the same time frame...early 70's. I was there in 1972 visiting my aunt and uncle who were stationed in Stuttgart with the Air Force. He arranged for a trip to Berlin for myself and some other girls who were visiting for the holidays. We did the usual "tourist bus" tour of West Berlin, and then my uncle arranged a more up close and personal tour with an aide the next day. I do remember a point on the tourist bus that I was becoming uncomfortable because something just seemed "off". The bus did a sudden hard left, and there was The Wall staring at us. Then I realized that my sense of unease had come from the fact that the nearer we got to the wall, the less activity there was on the street. Nobody walking, very few buildings, just lack of life.

And oh yeah...that was one serious party town at the time. It was also back when they loved Americans.

[DFW]

19. My wife was neutral on the subject of Americans at first.

She had never met one! At least not one who spoke German, and her English sucked n those days. So, I was basically her introduction to the species. She had English in school, but never had occasion to use it. Actually, with me, she never had occasion to use it, either, but a year later, when she made her first visit to the USA to spend some time with me, she was forced to remember what she could of English. It was very difficult for her at first, but she made a determined effort, and now can hold her own in almost any conversation, although reading a book or watching a film in English is still taxing for her. We have always spoken German with each other, and that never changed. The one iron-clad rule I had was that I would ALWAYS speak English with our children, no matter what. They understood everything, but at first always answered in German, as that was their language of preference. This was never a problem for me, but my parents found it horribly frustrating, as their grandchildren understood everything they said, but they couldn't understand their replies. This finally changed when the girls were 2½ and 4½ and my sister came to visit. They adored her, and she told them flat out she couldn't understand their German. *Poof* suddenly they started speaking English to her, and then to me as well, though often still using German syntax. When trying to tell a stranger that a big dog they knew was harmless, the little one always reassured strangers, "he bites not."

In West Berlin, the summer we met, the day started at around 8 PM, when my brother and I went from club to club to earn a few marks with which to buy our dinners. There was a Basque restaurant called the Borriquito at the corner of the Kantstrasse, and a lot of the folk musicians gathered there after the last club closed, and ordered cheap potato omelettes for breakfast until public transportation was running again, and we could get back to wherever it was that we were sleeping. We were a tight clique, but from everywhere. Americans, British, Irish, Thai, Iranians, French, South Americans, one Israeli and even a few Germans.

[DFW]

14. The Koenigsberger Klopse gave it away.

Kein Zweifel danach!

I met my wife in a "Folk Kneipe" near the Kudamm in July, 1974. This year makes it officially two thirds of our lives together. We always make it back to Berlin at least twice a year when I have to be there for work. Sort of like a pilgrimage for us, although these days, it's just a 4 hour train ride or a 50 minute flight.