Berlin

Former East Berlin

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I am off to Starbucks to spend an hour over coffee while checking my email but their Hotspot internet service is down. It’s a good time to revisit the former eastern sector of the city. Berlin’s architecture is stunning…old and new. Cranes hang suspended everywhere over the city. The Wall fell in 1989 and Germany has not looked back.

The West German Bundestag moved the capital of Germany from Bonn to the eastern sector of Berlin located in the middle of former East Germany and from a former wasteland has sprung a new urban district…a symbol of Germany’s Unity and the country’s success. The Brandenberg Gate is fully visible now with only strips of stone inset into the streets and sidewalks to show a new generation (dressed in retro east German clothing to tweak their parents) where the Wall once stood.

Concrete grey Friedrichstrasse in the former east sector is now the new hip place to be…hardly remembered from my 1965 trip to Europe. I asked a young English speaking guy “(I am German American,” he says) in a music shop to suggest some popular Berliner music but came away with two interesting “out there” Norwegian jazz CD’s.

Checkpoint Charlie that in 1965 released me and a friend from the American sector into the grey colorless landscape of East Berlin is now a tourist site.
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No Chinese Visa In Germany

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Today we try to get our China visa in Berlin, but were refused because we weren’t Germans. It was suggested by the Chinese embassy that we could get a visa in Hong Kong, but since our trans siberian tickets had us entering China from Mongolia, this presented a dilemma: without the visa the alternative would be to take a plane from Ulaan Baator Mongolia to Hong Kong and then back into mainland China. We decide to wait and see if we can get the visa en route…maybe Prague.

U-2 in Berlin

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Coming up out of the U-2 line of the Zoo railway station and thinking of course of the Irish rock band we enter now-rich, Western, happening Berlin. We pore over maps trying to get our bearings once again. Ah, the pension is close…we check in and nervously wait for a friend to fedex 6 months worth of forgotten pharmaceuticals…missing Austria and Hungary for lack of time.

While Bob explores on his own, I savor raw oysters and beer on the 6th floor of the amazing Ka-De-Wa Department store, the largest of it’s kind in all Europe. I make friends with 3 generations of a German family sitting next to me…the smooth-faced 14 year old grandson will soon be off to a Chicago suburb on a rotary exchange program…his mother is worried…the grandmother is too…walking slowly away she waves goodbye and looks back at me twice with a smile…the second time nodding her head…in assent of our brief friendship I think.The grandfather gives me his business card. We know we will never see each other again.