Our summer holiday is almost finished and we are returning to Hong Kong.  The time away was quite short, especially when it is remembered that even now, work e-mails are taking up to an hour or so each day, with issues of new enrolments, legal advice on draft policies, revised staffing needs and the release of IB results taking up the most time.  Actually, the release of the IB results brought great news for our students, with an excellent set of results being awarded, including 4 students with maximum scores of 45 and a College average of 37 points!

Much of the past week has been spent in Berlin.  For those of us who are “Cold War Kids”, to use the expression penned by Billy Joel in the song ‘Leningrad’, the Berlin Wall was a fact of life which was part of our upbringing.  Therefore, it was great to visit this once divided city, see the remnants of this front line of international tension, speak with local people who experienced the fall of the Wall in 1989, and experience the liberty of moving freely across what was once a heavily fortified international border.

During our time in Berlin, we did visit many places connected with the city’s recent past despite grey, overcast and wet weather conditions.  One of our first stops was Checkpoint Charlie, once the tense crossing point between capitalist West Berlin and communist East Berlin.  There is an excellent museum there, together with a great display on public billboards, and understated monuments in the pavement marking the precise location of the Wall.

The Wall featured in several of our other stops, including two sections of the city where remnants of the Wall have been left standing.  Even today, almost 18 years after the Wall fell, the differences between East and West Berlin remain stark.  The West is easily seen to be the more affluent area, while many remains of Soviet influence remain in the East, including the huge Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park, the huge socialist high rise housing blocks, and even the iconic bowler hatted traffic light man on the pedestrian crossing lights.

And yet, Berlin’s bright future as a reunited city also shines through.  The city seems to have come to grips with its past (hence the public outcry when the authorities proposed replacing the East’s traffic light man with the West’s more generic traffic signals).  A large and unsigned, yet highly evocative, memorial to the victims of the Holocaust has been built near the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate.  Perhaps most excitingly of all, the dome that has been constructed on the roof of the Reichstag, interestingly designed by a British architect, proclaims Germany’s optimism and confidence as it embarks on its new future as a reunited nation.

I have included a very small selection of images taken in Berlin during our time there.  I hope you enjoy this little insight into a fascinating city.

On Tuesday, I’ll be back in Hong Kong and working for most of this week in my office.  Fortunately, I will then have another short break which I will use to visit my three children who are living in Australia before returning to Hong Kong at the start of August to begin the new year’s work in earnest.