Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

How lucky are we that this milestone event was happening the week after our arrival??!! When the kids arrived at school on Friday there was hubbub in the front yard. It was divided in two and the Scorpions' "Wind of Change" was playing. We walked around the edge of the wall and saw this:

The kids were invited to draw on the wall, and there were some "food for thought" questions posted regarding the graffiti on the wall.

 







































Each class had a special period for Wall activities.






























Then Saturday we headed over to Checkpoint Charlie to see some of the special displays. Checkpoint Charlie was one of the US crossings where identification was checked (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.) There were white lighted balloons lining a portion of the route of the wall and special display boards telling 100 Wall Stories.

 Sunday we went to see the show at the Brandenburg Gate, one of the main symbols of Berlin. There were huge screens set up and performers and speakers were on stage. They were piping the sound to many different locations in the middle of Berlin. The number of people gathered there was amazing! One thing I noticed is that the crowd was extremely orderly. They were selling beer and gluh-wein (the traditional German hot drink) and many people were partaking but there was no shoving or fighting or anything inappropriate that I saw in the 3 or so hours we stood in the crowd. This was alternately really cool and really boring. Some of the performers were odd to my American taste, and they were interspersed with long speeches and interviews that were, of course, in German. It was a very cold and windy day/evening so standing in the crowd was actually beneficial because we could huddle like penguins, but after a while my feet started to freeze. A glass of gluh-wein with amaretto helped for a while. Also we were inhaling constant cigarette smoke, which makes me feel so yuck. Highlights included a young German musician who people seemed to know and Peter

Gabriel sang "We can be heroes". At 7:15 the balloons were due to be released and we watched the clock (and the children asked over and over) as the time approached. A German government guy took the stage and made a speech during which I heard the word "balloon" several times, so I knew it was about to happen. The kids of course couldn't see the stage since they were half as tall as the adults, so Dan and I had been taking turns hoisting them up in our arms or on our backs so they could see. At this moment I bent down to put Carter on my back so he could see the balloons go up, and when I stood up they were already loose! All that waiting and I missed it! I had to laugh. Dan said I didn't miss anything, that it was a bit anticlimactic.

Next the Berlin Philharmonic took the stage to perform Beethoven's 9th Symphony. We had promised the kids we would leave after the balloons were released because we had made them stand in the street for hours, but I was disappointed to leave and not hear one of the world's most famous orchestras. Even as we walked away we were able to hear the swell of the singing and it was beautiful. And from afar as we walked to the train station with hordes of people we heard the fireworks and were able to see them from a distance.

Balloons at Potsdamer Platz

Pieces of the wall juxtapose with glitzy Berlin Mitte

This guy was posing as a Russian soldier for pictures if you tossed a few Euros in his hat.

I took a few videos of the shows but they're too big to post here. And Dan's pictures of the Sunday festivities are a lot better than mine, so check this out if you want to see more photos: https://plus.google.com/photos/+DanCripe/albums/6079810401466446737