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relieved to be out of his presence. And I was quite pleased with myself when I heard him say, “Aw man, she got my money. She played me, y’all. She played the player.”
    monique bowden, originally from Guyana, loves to travel. She has visited sixteen countries–seventeen, if you count the Republic of Detroit. She resides in the warm south of Tallahassee, Florida, and used her hard-earned money to pamper herself with a day at the salon.

Selling the Berlin Wall

rivka solomon
    When the Berlin Wall “fell” in November 1989, there was nothing else on TV. I sat stunned, watching hordes of East and West Berliners streaming through gates finally opened to them afterdecades of separation. Revelers climbed on top of the wall itself, popping champagne corks and toasting what appeared to be the end of the Cold War. For three solid days the world was glued to CNN as German citizens furiously hammered at the graffiticovered west side of the wall. Picks, axes, and jackhammers were meeting its miles and miles of concrete. Apparently these folks thought they could slowly chip the wall out of existence. And they were right.
    This was history happening—a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. So what was a recent political science graduate, an international relations buff, to do? Well, duh. Go.
    Jobless and flat broke, I borrowed airfare from my mom and promised to have it back in a week. One week. Now I wasn’t being totally irresponsible; I had a plan. It wasn’t exactly one of those thought-through kind of plans; in fact, I suppose it was more closely related to an impulse. Two days before I hopped on the plane, I had come across a small paragraph in one of the many newspapers jam-packed with banner headlines, huge photos, and full-page accounts of the wall’s fall. A mere two lines, it said some entrepreneurial East Berlin kids were making a killing selling tourists bits of wall they’d chipped off. I packed my bags.
    When my backpack slid down the Berlin airport baggage ramp and onto the carousel for passengers to collect, I could hear the pick and hammer I’d stowed away clank against each other. And I wasn’t alone. Two other backpacks from my flight clanked the same way when they landed. One belonged to a fellow young American who confessed he was there to collect wall and make a buck. The second belonged to a big Irishman, also our age, who wanted to see history as it happened, and bring home a souvenir. Ideologically, I was somewhere in between the two. The three of us instantly bonded.
    Although our flight had landed late at night, we three went straight to the wall to scout out the work ahead of us. Within minutes of arriving at the daunting structure (it was much more imposing in person than on TV), and within seconds of puttingpick to concrete, we realized this was just about the hardest iron-rod-reinforced concrete any of us had ever seen—let alone tried to dismantle.
    From then on, I spent nearly every waking moment at the wall. Either I was holding extraordinary conversations about glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War with any of the thousands of Berliners and tourists flocking around, or I was hammering. Every few feet along the wall’s perimeter, someone was taking a crack at it. In a few rare places the wall had been slowly, methodically, smashed through. There we could squeeze in between the bent iron rods and into East Berlin’s barren no-man’s-land, where only a week earlier someone could have been shot for standing.
    By night, my two pals and I met up again only to collapse on incredibly uncomfortable cots in the cheapest and therefore most rundown hotel we could find. Rundown, yes, but they did provide strong pillowcases. Three days after I arrived, I left Berlin with a hotel pillowcase full of concrete, weighing in on the airport scale at ninety pounds. I also left the city with two rolls of film: proof of the authenticity of my goods. (“Pardon me, sir, would you mind taking a picture of