Ah, those 25-year anniversaries. As soon as the Wall came down, I was all over Eastern Europe. Not only did I catch the Berlin Wall three months before it fell, but I also approached Berlin from the East in Easter 1990, while everything was in limbo. But what I remember most from that trip is […]
The Day The Berlin Wall Came Down
In late August 1989 I went to Berlin and took this pic. I was amazed at how low The Wall was and how close to it you could get. It’s on the other side, of course, you couldn’t go anywhere near. I have written elsewhere about the day I spent in East Berlin, in through […]
My grand Bucharest Hotel
The Grand Budapest Hotel of the film may not itself exist – its exteriors were filmed in Schloss Heinewalde in Saxony and the interiors belonged to the Warenhaus Görlitz on the Czech-German border (after extensive restoration by Wes Anderson himself), but there are many that do. I have stayed in several grand European […]