Daisy's Blog

Alexanderplatz is all brand new with famous chain departmental stores and all the usual luxury goods. Outside the store I bought a sausage in a roll from a disabled young woman in a wheelchair, who had her little ‘shop’ attached to her chair, including a grill, which cooked the sausages! There was also a man carrying around his little shop like a walkabout cameraman, also selling grilled sausages.

Unified Berlin is certainly a place of great contrasts from the colourful Buddy Bears representing tolerance and peace, scattered all over the city, to the labyrinth of concrete plinths which is a monument to the murdered Jews of Europe.

I also went to Potsdam (former East Germany, 30 kilometers south of Berlin) which has been rebuilt but seemed lifeless. There are endless buildings of flats but I could see very few people around and they made very little noise.

Now to the PopKomm, a music exhibition only for professionals. As I received my badge to hang round my neck as an exhibitor, a hard plastic bracelet was locked tightly around my wrist and I was told I had to wear it for the duration of the fair, which was three days, day and night!

I protested and said I would cut it off at the end of the day when I left the fair, but was warned that they wouldn’t give me another one the following day by an astonished young woman who couldn’t believe I was contemplating not obeying her order. I solved the problem for the next day, Italian style, by cutting the menacing plastic bracelet and attaching sticky tape to it and more or less hiding it under a long-sleeved jumper!

I recently went to Berlin to go to a music trade fair, the PopKomm. The traffic was terrifying there. There are enormous roundabouts and you must choose which lane you wish to drive along before you have ever seen the place. If you are so unwise to hesitate for even half a second the cars behind you sound their horns immediately and the Berliners cut into your lane in front of you with great ease!

I passed by the old Checkpoint Charlie. This was a crossing point between West and East Germany during the Cold War which couldn’t be used by Eastern Germans wanting to come into the Western Sector, but only by foreign diplomats or foreigners wishing to visit East Berlin.

I had been to East Berlin before the fall of The Wall, where I saw great poverty and sadness. Hardly anybody smiled, there were few shops with practically nothing to buy in them, however, there were some foreign goods shops where you could buy luxury articles like Nescafé (!) but only with dollars, East Berlin deutschmarks were not accepted.

I remember that coming back to West Berlin from the Eastern Sector the police used a mirror on a stick to look under our car – as they always did – to see if someone was there holding on to the bottom of the car to escape into the Western Sector, because someone had escaped in this way before.

Now there are sandbags piled up and bouquets of fresh flowers lying in the middle of the street at Checkpoint Charlie. The whole area has now been transformed into a living museum.