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Berlin and Pottsdam
Barbara and I just got back from
Eastern Europe last night. Our two bags decided to hang around in
Chicago an extra day, and we were a little disappointed to arrive at
home without them. Fortunately, the airline brought them to us at
Arkadelphia a day late, so all's well that ends well.
Barbara started a two week English
as a Second Language Academy at Henderson State University the day after we got back, twelve hours
a day for two weeks. She was a little draggy about getting around the
next morning after that long trip from Berlin. I gave her a little
pep talk at 5:00 AM, reminding her she would be making her first
impression on sixty people she didn't know, never seen before, and
she would be older than all the others, the only one not a current
teacher, and she would need to “fake it until you can make it.”
She finally pulled herself together, put on her perky face, and
bounced out the door to begin a whole new career, at a salary of -0-
dollars per year, at a time in her life when she fully deserves a
rocking chair on the front porch. You go, girl!
We arrived in Berlin at high noon,
and were promptly picked up and driven to our hotel by a very
expensive ride, a Globus tour bus. This trip is unlike all our other
world travel trips. This is a guided tour. We were accompanied by
Barbara's older sister, Frances, and her son Doug, an auditor
employed by the state. Nice to have his sharp young mind along, to
handle most of the hard thinking, so we can sit back and enjoy this
trip.
Our tour director is a six foot
tall, slim, blonde, and energetic lady from Slovakia, I think. She
never did actually tell me that. She's also a Political Science
teacher, been a tour director for many years, pretty well hovered
over us like a mother hen, and on the road she filled our heads with
an astounding amount of knowledge and interesting stories, always
talking without any notes whatsoever, as far as I could tell. Her
name is Janya Gobec. Although she speaks eight languages fluently,
she never got my name right. I was “Geee-lumm” the day we
arrived, and when we parted, I was still the same.
I make no claims as to the
absolute accuracy of historic fact here. I feel certain it was
accurate when it came from her mouth; past that point, what I'm
telling you is what I remember, as I remember. Please try to not be
overly judgmental. After all, I DID turn 69 on this trip. Just how
much can one expect from a man that old?
Barbara and I pretty much expected
the bus would drop us off right at the front door of whatever we were
there to see, pick us up at that door when we had seen it, kinda like
we've seen the tour busses do the old folks in Branson. Boy were we
wrong. The really good things to see in Eastern Europe require almost
as much walking time as riding time, and that six foot tall walking
encyclopedia set a pretty good pace. Barbara quickly found herself
buying Polish tennis shoes.
The hotels were top notch, many
notches above what Barbara and I were used to on our travels, and I
was shocked to see that foreign hotels DO have elevators. We moved
from the Hostel to the Hilton. Breakfasts were all included in the
price, and Barbara and I, in our other travels, always tried to eat
enough to last all day, as if we had no idea when our next meal was
coming. Frances always seemed to have an endless stash of candy bars,
breakfast bars, apples, you name it. Our other meals turned out to be
very filling too, and I dreaded my first encounter with a set of
scales when we got back. Frances, unlike me, had the self discipline
to “eat to live,” while I “live to eat.”
We began our tour with a local
tour guide in Berlin, as we did in all the major cities. Berlin,
while it is again beautiful, is still rebuilding from the destruction
of WWII, which took out the vast majority of their large buildings.
But the replacements are more modern, and while the buildings are
beautiful, the intricately beautiful artistic detail of the older
buildings are missing. Our guide, a native Berliner, spoke often of
the Battle of Berlin in 1945. Many of the older buildings were
destroyed then, in a battle she saw as completely unnecessary, as
only old men and radical boys were left to fight for Berlin, against
two million Russians. Many of the few older, partially surviving
buildings still show thousands of bullet holes, and cranes are still
working everywhere on new construction.
Checkpoint Charlie was just down
the street from our hotel, which was actually in East Berlin. It was
accompanied by a section of the wall that still ex ists. One of the
young men in our group bought a piece of the wall for every member of
our tour group. Now, who does that? For a group of strangers? I just
had to find out more about this young man. Must be a story behind
this. Sure enough, Rob turned out to be in his thirties, owned
several companies, and wanted to see all the world he could. He is
married, but he and his wife do not like the same kind of travel. He
tends to go to the wildest and most dangerous places he can get into,
usually, though this was not one of them. Frances was quick to
inquire about the wife, and what she thought about all this.
Rob explained that the men in his
family tend to die early. He had to go while he could, and money did
not seem to be a factor. His generosity in buying a gift for every
member of our group, forty or so, quickly made him a popular figure
in our bunch.
We went to Pottsdam that
afternoon, and saw a lot of beautiful castles, and learned a lot
about the Hessians and the Pottsdam Accords, which split up Eastern
Europe after the war. The meetings were started by Stalin, Roosevelt,
and Churchill. Stalin was the only one of the three still around when
when the issues were settled, Roosevelt dying and Churchill being
replaced. Stalin had a large, manly desk in the meeting area, while
Churchill's was smaller, and his wide body could not fit into his
narrow chair. He quickly moved to a couch nearby, with a picture of a
dog hanging above. But he soon became upset by the fact that the dog
in the picture was a bulldog, looking far too much like him. Walking
many of those palace hallways was a bit unsettling, knowing we were
walking where Hitler walked.
Berlin is beautiful, once again,
though different. The reconstruction still goes on, as it has through
out my lifetime. I was born seven days before D-day, in 1944.
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