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My September holiday has started!
And so far, so good.
Very good, to be honest. Ryanair has transported me safely to Berlin – and the flight was 20 minutes early!
I am in the airport hotel at Schönefeld overnight. It is very good too, and right beside the railway station- city centre 30 minutes. The hotel even gave me a free 24 hour travel card. It is the Intercity Hotel (one good turn deserves another).
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I had time for a couple of hours in the city before it started to get dark. The train took me the Friedrichstrasse to wander around Under den Linden, the Brandenburger Tor and Reichstag.
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The last time I used Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse was May 1990. The DDR had opened its borders but was still a separate state. Foreigners still had to use an official border crossing (the station was one of them) while locals walked through holes in the wall. I had to pay for a visa and convert the mandatory minimum of hard currency into useless Ostmarks.
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It all seems quite unreal now.
I was there for a legal conference. The start of the Single Market in 1992 was the topic.
Yes, unreal now.
The conference was held in the Reichstag – the West German Government was still in Bonn.
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Very unreal.
My only other visit to Berlin was in February 2003, taking my son for a wee trip during his school’s mid term break. He would have been 10 years old.
One highlight was going to see Eisbären Berlin playing ice hockey. The team plays in a big fancy arena now, with average crowds of over 12,000, but back then the venue was the Wellblechpalast in Hohenschönhausen – one of the eastern suburbs.
Wellblechpalast translates as “corrugated iron palace”, and it was 40 years old even then. Eisbären grew out of Dynamo Berlin – the East German police and secret service sports club.
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Yes, good to be back and it is a shame it is just an overnight stay.
ⓒ iain taylor, 2019
🏴🇪🇺🇩🇪