April 1, 2012
-
Checkpoint Charlie
Our two days touring Berlin were both supposed to be cold and maybe rainy. Thursday looked better than Friday (online, at least), so we decided to do “Outdoors Berlin” on the first day. Our first stop? Dunkin’ Donuts.
Our first REAL stop? Checkpoint Charlie!
Now remember, the Berlin Wall was built to keep people in East Germany from sneaking off into Western Germany where freedom and McDonald’s awaited. But, there were checkpoints to get through the wall. The most famous was Checkpoint C, and C in the phonetic alphabet is “Charlie” (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie…) It was where tanks faced each other in this iconic photo of 1961′s Berlin Crisis.
(There was a crisis in Berlin in 1961? Yes, it was over the communists wanting the city all to themselves. This is an iconic photo? It must be. It was on tons of postcards.)
It turns out that it was a good thing our first stop was at Dunkin’ Donuts. We had an extra one, and James gave it to the guard. He was very grateful and chatted with us for a long while and stamped a “passport” for us with all sorts of stamps.
Now, an astute reader would say, “Guards? What sort of guards? This checkpoint has been abandoned!” Well done. They are actors. For 2 Euro a person, you can pose with them. You can go over to the actual building for free and peek in the windows, but there wasn’t much to see. Just a picture of some guy and some poster that was impossible to read. I wondered if on warm days, they brought it out or something?
They left the signs up that warned people of which side of the wall they were on. Not that you’d probably need to be told which side was which. If guns were pointed at you to keep you from crossing, you were on the East side. If there was a bunch of graffiti, you were on the West side.
These days, instead of guards, they have large photos of an American soldier and a Russian soldier surveying the territory, one on each side of a sign.
The wall might not be there, but they remember.
Comments (2)
Not being a party-pooper- but, I have seeing foreign locations and seeing things like Dunkin’ Donuts, Old Navy and Mc Donalds there…..
However, I’m SURE- IN FACT POSITIVE that if I were actually to be in one of those foreign locations I’d totally be searching the streets high and low for a familiar logo!
I love the way you write. I really do.
And by the way, I’m happy to inform, I am an astute reader….because I was like, “GUARDS?” What the heck are there guards there for?
You are my astute reader. And thanks for loving the way I write because I don’t know how to write any other way.