Berlin

It felt like the end of an era as I dropped off Elizabeth at Tegel airport yesterday. She has an internship to be getting on with, but it sure would have been nice if she'd been able to stay here longer. I don't mind admitting that I sniffled a bit on my way to the other airport, but my transition had to be a quick one, as my dad was flying in for a two-week vacation.

We started out with a bang, staying smack dab in the middle of Berlin's downtown, where on a one-square-block reconnaissance tour around our hotel we spotted 12 different ethnic restaurants. The city squares are packed with Berliners, tourists and street dancers; I've died and gone to heaven. This city is teeming with life, and in it, so do I.

We decided to spend the first part of today on a walking tour of a few of Berlin's major sites. Our guide was Brian, a theater artistic director and free-lance opera manager from Edmonton who moonlights as a tour guide in Berlin. From the outset it was clear that he was passionate and articulate and more than a little theatrically talented. He had his international audience alternately in stitches and in tears, and at the end of the tour I found that my passion for and knowledge of Berlin had increased tenfold. He introduced us to the reigning princes of the Hohenzollern dynasty and painted us a brilliant picture of a post-war Berlin, divided by the whims of the four conquering powers. He told us sincere and moving stories about those who risked and lost their lives in the attempt to go over the Wall and break into the freedom of West Berlin, guided us through Berlin as a lover, caressing her curves, waxing philosophic about her faults, and discoursing passionately about her people and her places.

The three-and-a-half-hour tour turned into six, and Brian never for a moment lost our rapt attention. After a moving final soliloquy about the six weeks that changed the world (in October and November, 1989), we gave him a standing ovation and he invited us all to his favorite pub for a beer. On rickety picnic tables in an alley covered three layers deep with graffiti, sixteen of us from seven different coutnries spent four hours in conversations that ranged from politics to religion to love to popular film. I came away with the deeply satisfied feeling of having lived every minute to the fullest.


This is what I love about traveling: filling my mind and my heart with new impulses, new learnings, new friends. Tomorrow we head back to my apartment overnight before flying out to Mallorca!