h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I set up a summer course in Poland to convert Russian teachers into English teachers. Sat here this morning drinking strong coffee from one of the very rare Solidarnosc/British Council mugs I had made in Lincoln for that course, I was wondering what had happened to the participants.
I don't think any of us thought of the EU expanding so fast, so some of them may be in England where they are contributing to the decline of the crime rate - this morning's papers report that areas with large numbers of eastern European immigrants have substantially less crime than others.

We participated in something similar. We were host (the school generally and us personally) to teachers of Russian from East Germany.

As a reminder, there are 10 "old" (Western) and 6 "new" (Eastern) States in Germany. After the re-unification, our state was partnered with Thuringia, to collaborate with on and help implement the Western education system.

Teachers in Eastern Germany would no longer be teaching Russian and would have to change to other languages. Mainly English, probably, like those you were coaching, but we had a visit from a lady from the partner school in Greiz, who was going to "convert" to Latin.

The partnerships sort of petered out and we haven't heard from them for ages.

As it's 23 years, the kids who were being born then have now spent their whole lives in the new system. They have never had to cross Checkpoint Charlie or the Friedrichsstrasse, or hear regular news bulletins about shootings at the border between, say, Bavaria and Thuringia. Unless their parents have told them, and shown them photographs, they won't have any idea what the roads looked like when nearly everyone drove a Trabant/Wartburg, they will find it impossible to conceive of an education system where the powers that be decided which career you were to take.

Sorry. I could go on. And don't start me on the school system. It is generally accepted that the East German school system was the superior one, with a few exceptions, and it was totally bulldozed by the Western one.

Let us be thankful that that revolution passed with little loss of life, and that, slowly, the East and the West are coming to understand each other. There are still a couple of generations to go to do away with the differences and prejudices, but they were only in force for 40 years, so there's not quite such an inherent animosity as in other parts of the world.

To this day, inexplicably, nothing moves me more than seeing footage or hearing the speech of Hans Dietrich Genscher in Budapest, and seeing the first "Trabbies" driving unhindered through those barriers which had for many years meant such hatred, mistrust, and artificially imposed divisions.

I have never been to Eastern Germany, except Berlin, but I know lots of people who have come here since the gates were opened. These days they can speak English. Only the ones in their late 30s and upwards can speak Russian. They are all very good at maths and sciences.

Nowadays my 24-year-old son just "pops" to Leipzig from Berlin to get a lift home with a friend who is at University there. Unthinkable when I was pregnant with him.

Thanks for those memories, some of which are indelibly etched.
The previous year my younger son was visiting his penfriend in Berlin and I had to give written permission for him to visit East berlin. By the time of his visit the wall was down, but his host family had saved him a small fragment which is still in use in my study as a paperweight.