Daisy's Blog

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.