East Germany

I made this trip when this part of Germany, although the Berlin Wall had already fallen a few months earlier, was still the G.D.R. In fact the act of unification between the two Germanies had not yet been ratified, even though the borders between West and East had been abolished. I was travelling by train with a friend and we arrived by train ferry from Gedser in Denmark. The ship docked near Warnemunde; it was a hot day in late June and I remember the beach with the bathers. The train that came off the ship continued to Berlin Zoo Garden. We arrived in the evening in the capital of East Germany but moved to the Western part (West Germany), to Zoo Garden Station, where some Italian guys we had got to know offered us hospitality in a hostel where they were staying. Near the station we observed the imposing bulk of the church bell tower, which still shows the signs of a bombing.

We reached the hostel after a long stretch on the metro; it was set in a park and they let us in like stowaways. We slept on the floor. The following morning we took the metro back to East Berlin to see the Brandenburg Gate and the famous Alexanderplatz with the world clock. We also went into a grocery shop to do a bit of shopping, then, from the station, we took the train again for Czechoslovakia (at the time it was called that because the separation between Czechia and Slovakia had not yet taken place).