For many years I’ve attended a travel conference in Berlin, and on one memorable occasion, it was held around the time the Berlin Wall was coming down. I knew I wanted to see the wall again, especially as it was actually coming down, so when I was planning my trip to Berlin, I included a small hammer and chisel in my bag.
Sure enough, one day, a friend and I went to the Wall to see what’s up. Everywhere we looked, people were trying to knock out a piece of the wall. People were renting ladders and hammers from forward-thinking entrepreneurs, but I was ahead of the game.
I brought my stuff with me.
I asked one of the people there if I could borrow his ladder for a short time. He agreed, and I began hammering into the wall and chiseling pieces off. Let me say right now that was one hard wall. It was solid concrete, reinforced beyond belief.
This was Class A, East German concrete.
I was teetering on the ladder right above where my friend took this photo. I was pounding the wall, and small pieces began to fall off. I managed to hack off several pretty good size pieces with minimal damage to my knuckles.
I brought the pieces (and my equipment) back to San Francisco. As luck would have it, one of my daughters was studying the fall of the Wall in school. I gave her a handful of brightly colored concrete to take to school for show and tell. Suffice to say, she got an “A” on that project.
The photo here was taken while I was pounding away at the wall; I still have several pieces of the wall on my desk. I hope that this is the only Wall that restricted anyone’s movement anywhere in the world.
Are we there yet? 