I don't remember what year it was when Steve and I went to Berlin. '89? 90? 91? It's all a blur.
We were too late for the party, but not so late that you could just meander from West Germany to Berlin without going on a train and getting passports checked. It must have been right after the Berlin Wall came down. We went and took a look at the wall, and bought chunks of the Wall in little bags. Or so they say. Could be any chunks of concrete, really.
I don't remember a lot of that time since I didn't write about it and blogs had not been invented yet. But when I stumbled over this packet of concrete yesterday, I suddenly remembered the Wall as it was then and as it was in 2001, when it was a small slab, one of the few sections left standing for historical purposes.
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There are actually a lot of big sections of the Wall still in existence, the longest being the East Side Gallery over by Ostbahnhof, which I think is close to a kilometer long, but which has unfortunately been almost erased in places by people writing on it -- mostly in Spanish, for some reason.
If you were buying little packets of the Wall with that fake "authenticity" stamp, it was probably '91 at the earliest. I was a real connoisseur of Commie souvenirs, and used to troll the Polish fleamarket in Potsdamer Platz for Russian watches (still have a few) and medals, which I sold at garage sales back in Austin at mega-inflated prices. What's in that bag may be genuine, but I also heard tales of Turkish guys getting concrete slabs, handing their kids spray-cans of paint and letting them loose, then sledgehammering the slab to bits and bagging the ones with paint on 'em.
My pieces of the Wall are genuine, since I harvested them myself.
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