“Darin it was all a mess,”he continued in English. It looked newly painted, waxed, dusted, brushed, polished, rubbed, and scrubbed. We stopped at the Hotel am Zoo where the Herr Fortier himself took me up in a silent and sedate lift to a large, impeccable room. It had become, like so much else in Berlin, part of a curious, neo-romantic bombscape. Some of it was already covered with moss, grass, and even ivy. The mass of pinkish ruins had receded into the background and had acquired an ageless permanent visage. Boys and girls passed my “bug” on new bicycles. They walked faster, and some had new clothes, new handbags, new shoes. The people looked younger, fresher, fatter. No more the sallow elderly men, the gaunt women with their sickly children, who dragged themselves along the streets of Berlin in 19, with sullen expressions. But most of the cavities had been cleared of rubble and transformed into parking lots the ruins had been tidied and surrounded by brick walls the rubble had been piled in orderly heaps, encased in flower beds, or framed with borders of freshly mowed grass.Īnd the people had changed. True enough, between them were gaping cavities, blocks of ruins, heaps of rubble.
From the low windows of the car, I could see rows of small stores, their show windows packed with goods, and one-story dwellings, newly built and freshly painted. Then I climbed into a tiny “bug" - the Volkswagen-type taxi - and we began driving towards the center of West Berlin. The wornout sofas and club chairs stood in the same old places the same sickening smell of doughnuts and coffee the same row of bored, jaundiced porters in their black Luftwaffe overalls.
Inside, the terminal seemed equally unchanged. The plane skimmed the jagged ruins towards the gray semicircle of the Tempelhof Terminal. The same pitiful squares of vegetable gardens planted between ruins and rubble the same treeless parks the same naked sadness, ruin, and desolation. Yes, there it was, so familiar, so unchanged - just as I had left it three years ago. I looked out of the window where the left wing dipped menacingly over the ground. “Thank heavens, it’s nearly over!" I thought as a last bump jolted me half out of the seat. When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online.FASTEN your safety belts, please,” said the neutral voice in the loud-speaker. Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering. Protect your children from adult content and block access to this site by using parental controls. PARENTS, PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to keep any age-restricted content from being displayed to your children or wards. Furthermore, you represent and warrant that you will not allow any minor access to this site or services. This website should only be accessed if you are at least 18 years old or of legal age to view such material in your local jurisdiction, whichever is greater.
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