lichtsamenberlin
Nov 20
Nov 13
Hundreds of people died in front of Parliament in 1956 when the Red Army fired on demonstrators.
Grounds around Parliament. There was an “official function” that day so I had to be content with the exterior.
At Parliament I met hIrSch, a fellow originally from Tennessee who was biking around the world. He has biked from Alaska to the tip of South America, and is heading south on his Eurasian tour these days.
At the Parliament building in Budapest
Nov 01
The hof of the Green Bridge hostel. More Prague and Budapest (and Berlin) when I’m back in the States!
It was a short bus ride into the country to see where all the old communist statues were sent for the rest of their days.
A party boat on the Danube.
Naptime on the Budapest Castle Hill grounds
Budapest Keleti trainstation.
The morning of 26 Oct at Prague Castle.
I took a day trip from Prague and visited (with a Russian couple that adopted me) an ossuary in Kutna Hora. It was sad and fascinating at the same time and felt like stepping into a Heavy Metal album cover.
I may not have much time to post until I’m back in the States, but here are are a few good ones from my trip to Prague and Budapest. This was taken somewhere in the Czech Republic on the train.
Oct 22
Taken at the airport in the early morning, after saying goodbye to K, 6 Oct.
the wall in our minds
I’ve met several Berliners with stories of the Wall’s fall, excited at the new opportunity. But this weekend was the first time that I met someone who told me without any qualification that the fall of the Wall was felt as a bad thing, for her and for her family. she said it was “horrible.”
I was drinking coffee at St. Oberholz, and started talking to a woman who sat at my table (sharing tables is pretty common in Europe; there’s no such thing as a full room, if there are chairs). She said she was 18 in 1989, and so had not formed many of her own ideas about East vs. West, communism and capitalism. All she knew was that everything she’d been prepared for had collapsed completely. The future she had been brought into just totally ceased.
For about four years they scaped by, suddenly with West German bosses and West German landlords — the people with the money, after all, though this is a generalization, still own much of the East and the disparity of East and West is marked. She referred to “the wall in our minds,” that barrier that still exists between East and West, that comes from habit, and history.
She said that it took travel, to Holland, to France, to Ireland, to change her mind about it, and accept the new opportunities in front of her, rather than the ones she was prepared for. She told me that travel helped her see that bigger problems face the world than East and West.
