Back to Berlin 18 years after Reunification

(NOTE: This entry was posted May 19, 2008 on a another site)

Hi - I'm in Berlin this evening (the other one that's not next to I-495), going through another burst of overseas travel. I was last here October, 1990, and as luck would have it this was coincident with the day the East and West Germany became a single country. I remember back then knowing what an extraordinary moment this was, as I got to see history being made all around me. I also have vivid memories of walking through East Berlin (incredibly sterile and run-down at the time), seeing a good portion of the wall still up (but with lots of pieces already taken away), and walking through the no man's land where the wall used to be. There were several informal memorials of flowers and/or small crosses placed much as what you see along highways in our country marking the places where people died. Only in this case, the people remembered here were shot trying to cross over into West Berlin -- some as recently as just the year before I walked by.

Fast forward to today (May, 2008) and East Berlin is now very modern and trendy. I passed a Ferrari dealership right on Unter der Linden, the main drag in East Berlin that leads up to the Brandenburg Gate, which has now been restored to look much as it did when this was considered the finest boulevard in the city. Where the wall stood, you can find some markers noting its location, but otherwise the integration between east and west is seamless. You'd never know how different the place looked 18 years ago.

Which brings me to the topic of this post ... things that didn't end up in our DreamGrids. I think a key part of the DreamProcess is to dream -- but also to allow space for things not dreamed about/wished for to simply emerge in the moment. Here's what got me thinking about this ....

While this business trip has been typical with most of the day spent in windowless meeting rooms, tonight I ate my first ever Jamaican meal (very good) at a hole-in-the-wall called "Soon Come" in a racially mixed neighborhood nearby. The other diners included a french family with a toddler (and another on the way), a young lesbian couple who spoke fluent English and German, and a guy from who knows where who got temporarily booted from his apartment as his roommate was recording a CD.

Just another day in Berlin, I guess.

So I asked the owner (Jeff) how did a Jamaican restaurant end up in Berlin, of all places? He said he came here about 12 years ago because there were construction jobs related to the post-reunification building boom. Those jobs eventually dried up, so Jeff moved to London, found he missed this place and came back. He had always dreamed of having his own restaurant, so with a friend he opened up the restaurant about 3 1/2 years ago, but the friend abandoned the business 3 weeks later. The rest, he noted, was history. Along the way he created a vibrant, fun place for a diverse community of people to come together.

Maybe Jeff had a DreamGrid or DreamBoard of some sort. I didn't remember to ask. But for me, neither tonight's experience nor the one I had 18 years ago were ever on the dream-focused radar, yet they both had a "wow" factor akin to dreams coming true. Just some fuel for thought ...