EAST BERLIN
Thirty years since fall of the Wall
Sunday People
EASTERN PROMISE
It was a wild summer night in a derelict building filled with cool young artists.T here was a Russian MiG fighter jet out front. A pink Second world War Panzer tank out back. And lots of beer and schnapps in my belly.
That’s all I really remember of my brief visit to East Berlin in 1994.
Back then I stayed in the relatively genteel West Berlin. The East in comparison seemed wilder, sparsely populated and still battle scarred almost 40 years after the war.
This time, 30 years after the fall of the Wall, I stayed out east in uber-cool Friedrichshain, an area similar to London’s Shoreditch or Manchester’s Northern Quarter.
The former industrial zone was laid to waste in the war and rebuilt Soviet style when it became part of communist East Berlin – complete with giant statue of Lenin...
AMSTERDAM
The other side of the city
Sunday People
OLD DOCKS WITH BIG SHOCKS
The labyrinth of streets and canals. Pretty gabled buildings, all skinny and wonky. Grand museums and galleries. Old cafes, hazy coffee shops. The red lights and flesh in the windows.
That’s the old Amsterdam. But I was there to see the new Amsterdam. The less well-known one, born out of the once industrial waterfront.
Most tourists don’t get time to stray far beyond the historic centre and its web of canals. But the waterways open up into broad blue docks and a very different city.