Sunday, October 12, 2008

What He Said At Dinner Last Night

My fiance lived in Berlin from the mid-1980's to the mid-1990's and last night at dinner he said something important. What he said caught us all by surprise, we'd been talking about this current financial meltdown, and the strange news every day in the papers, and the flood of news lately.

"This reminds me of Berlin, 1989 ..." The summer before the Berlin Wall fell, he told us how suddenly things were moving so quickly, you could feel history was being made all around you.

He told us, you would get up in the morning, eager to read the papers or listen to the radio because unimaginable things would have happened literally overnight, there could be amazing events reported within the space of hours, not months ... everything was happening very quickly. It was mostly good things that were happening from our point of view, but being in the middle of it was breathtaking, and it wasn't always easy to sort the good from the bad.

"You knew the old order was changing right before your eyes, and nothing would be the same."