Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from April, 2011

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

I could not have even dreamed that I would visit a wall-less Berlin in a reunited Germany in my lifetime. Conventional wisdom told us that short of a Nuclear Holocaust the Wall was there to stay - just like the Greyness, the Stasi and Honecker of GDR. How ironical that the International Tourism Bourse more famously known as ITB, the world's largest showcase on travel and tourism, was organized in West Berlin every year in the month of March while just a stone's throw away Berliners in the east could not even cross over the Wall to the west, far less travel to exotic destinations around the world! I remember crossing over to the east of the city in my earlier visits to West Berlin. A Nepalese gentleman married to a Polish lady and living on the other side of the wall played host. He was working for Siemens and enjoying the best of both worlds! For all its dullness East Berlin was inexpensive and earning the mighty Deutsch Mark while spending it in the east was an assured way to