Flying to Europe is so easy compared with getting to Thailand or Japan. The first flight, from Boston to Amsterdam, took only six hours; our flight was delayed fifteen minutes because there were such strong tailwinds that we would have arrived too early if we had left on time!  

     So here I am in Berlin, staying in a hotel that was in the former East Berlin. People who are either from Russia, or who have visited there, say this part of Berlin looks very much like Russia, with all the stark, block apartment buildings, and less than artistic architecture. To me it looks grey and unimaginative, at least the parts I have seen in my two days here so far. Our hotel is right next to a former slaughterhouse, all rundown now, broken, sitting beside an idle empty lot full of pieces of crumbled construction materials. One woman on this tour asked what kind of slaughterhouse it used to be; I thought that was a very good question. It was for animals, of course, but a potentially horrifying thought had been in many minds.   

     Today we went to see Checkpoint Charlie, the Reichstag, Museum Island, the Jewish memorial -- built on a part of what used to be No-Man's Land, and the part of the Berlin wall that still stands.  Much of the wall is painted now, an incredible array of artists' visions from many countries. The wall that still stands is backed by the river Spree, a beautiful, peaceful setting that defies the imagination to picture what this area looked like less than only thirty years ago. We also walked through the Brandenburg Gate, the only one of 17 original gates left standing after the devastation of WWII. I asked our guide if it was still emotional for her to be able to walk through to the former West Berlin, and she said yes. Near the Brandenburg Gate there is a permanent marking on the road where the wall stood, a double row of bricks built into the street. We stepped on them as we crossed over; I felt that traffic should have stopped to let us linger and feel the history of this place, if only for a little while.

     It rains in Berlin in the springtime, and the weather is chilly, only mid-40s, but today during our explorations the sun broke out several times. It was magnificent then, this brightening of our grey day accompanied by birdsong and budding trees and tender new flowers, the feeling of enormous possibility that one feels in early spring. I couldn't help but feel that the sun's coming out was a parallel to what it must have felt like to Berliners, perhaps all Germans, after the wall came down.