Reminiscing the Past...

 

WARNING LONG WINDED POST LOL.....

I just was thinking today about the end of my 10th grade.   I worked all year at Burger King trying to save money for  a foreign exchange trip to Germany.  My parents were not wealthy and how could they be with 7 kids.  Almost an impossibility.  So I had to work hard for this trip.   I had been taking German for 2 years at that point and thought I knew the language. By the end of my 10th grade I had successfully saved up the money needed to spend a whole month in a suburbs of Frankfurt.   I was so excited as Germany is my family's place of origin.  My grandpa Wendt was born in Bonn, Germany and my older brother Shawn had just received his call for his Mormon Mission to Dusseldorf Germany.  Any young girl would be excited, not only to be an exchange student, but go to a place full of history.

It was 1990, (that tells you how old I am, LOL) and communism in E. Germany was on it's way out.   We, as students, were told to get visas just in case the East side open up.  We had planned a trip to a city on the East side called Weimar.  This place is where a concentration camp once stood from WWII.  Just months before this was the spectacular event of the Berlin Wall coming down.   Just the week before we left for our journey, the money for both East and West changed over to what we now know as the German Mark (the Euro is used all over for the most part now).   Also we where blessed enough for the boarders to open up so we could enter the East with little or no problem.  What a blessing for the East German people and for a whole bunch of young American exchange students to experience one of the most important events in history.  

Because of the terrorist threat to the airlines, our little German exchange group drove up to Toronto (I was raised in Rochester, NY) and boarded a Lufthansa airliner to take the 12 hour journey to a foreign country.  I was excited as I was about to meet the family that would be housing me for the next month.  

My host family were kind and  wonderful... they where transplants from Iran who now lived in Germany.  They took me around when we were not in School and showed me Germany.   We went to the inland beach (i don't remember the name), in their convertible cabriolet, driving, mind you, with the top down as the wind hit our faces.  But one thing that struck me about this family was I could hardly understand them for the life of me.  I kept telling myself, "I don't know German like I thought I did".  By the end of the trip I finally told them I did not understand what they where saying.  They laughed and told me that they where mixing German with Arabic...  WHAT...no wonder why I could hardly understand a word they where saying, LOL. 

Well anyway's,  fast forward to last November when I again had the opportunity to visit Germany and see what had become of the Berlin Wall and passing of communism as we knew it.  James and I went on a 16 day tour of Berlin, Germany, Stockholm Sweden, and Copenhagen Denmark for a business trip.  We actually stayed in East Germany, go figure.    The Wall is down, it is now a place of artistry. The East looks very similar to the West, and the city is whole. FINALLY....  Life there now thrives after the removal of a communist rule...  

I am glad I was given 2 opportunities to see History in the making.   Eighteen years later as I visited the once communist ruled area I couldn't help but think how grateful I was to be able to see it all again.