In Berlin (part 1)

In Berlin, by the Wall, You were 5 foot 10 inches tall...

it was very nice...

Did I ever tell you about the time we first went to Berlin? This post is long, so will break it down into several, I think.

Cat and I decided to hitch-hike to Berlin to see Roger Waters in concert. (the Wall had recently come down and he decided to hijack this historical occasion by staging his self-indulgent self-aggrandising psychodramatic rock opera in the middle of Berlin in the Potsdammer Platz. It was the kind of thing we liked as self-indulgent self-aggrandising psychodramatic moany teenagers.)

I don't recall much about the journey. We must have got lifts, I remember quite a few Dutch lorry drivers, who'd offer you their Drum tobacco ("It's called Shag! Teehee!) and cough their guts up and bang their chests and tell you it was good for you. We got stuck as night fell on the French-German border, no drivers could see us in the dark, so we ended up sleeping in a truck stop toilet (it was the disabled toilet, big enough to accommodate two), though being a German toilet it was pristinely clean.

The next day a lovely East German couple in a skoda gave us a lift into the city. Their English was better than our German but we bonded. They made a passerby take a photo of us all as a momento. I remember the guy saying solemnly to us in farewell as we got out "And if you take off your clothes, wear a condom."

We wound up in a hostel, where we met two Dutch bikers. More on them tomorrow.