The Festival of Freedom

As many of you know, November 9th was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Conveniently enough we live in Berlin, so we got to see some of the events first hand!

I'm not sure what people heard in other countries, but one of the things that they did to celebrate was build a "domino wall" throughout the city. Different 13th grade classes in the former East and West Germany were invited to create a piece of the wall, including a class from my school.

Here you can see the piece that they made. What was especially cool was their piece was sponsored by the American Embassy here and the class got to meet Hilary Clinton! There are some pictures here from a local newspaper with pictures of them with her.

Anyway, so they put pieces of the walls back to back and this went from the Brandenburg Gate in a few different directions. Linnea, with some other English teaching assistants, went to the Festival of Freedom, as they called in, to see all of the happenings a.k.a. see them knock all the pieces down.


This was Linnea's view of the Brandenburg Gate. As you can see it was packed. If you look close enough you can see the giant screen where they showed all the speeches and musical guests, so that everyone could see what was going on. Unfortunately the weather was quite cold and rainy, but it was certainly manageable.


Proof that Linnea didn't just steal some one else's pictures :) You can see some of the pieces of the wall behind her.


This is what it looked like with all the pieces of the wall lined up.


Some pieces more up close. You can see that they the crowds were separated from the pieces with a gate and then they had people in silver coats (on the right) who were patrolling the in between area.

There were also special guests that came! The leaders of Germany, France, Russia, and Great Britain As mentioned before, Hilary Clinton was in Berlin and above is a very blurry picture of her during her speech.


Obama couldn't make it, for whatever reason (a lot of people found it a bit odd and even disrespectful) but! he recorded a speech and sent it with Clinton.

Beyond just political leaders, they also had celebrities, authors, and musicians come. For example Bon Jovi was there, as well as Muhammed Yunus (above) who is essentially the inventor of microlending.

After many speeches, interviews, and musical performances the time came for all of the wall to be knocked down. It was very dramatic- with a countdown and everything and this:


is the aftermath!

And to end the whole night there were fireworks, of which I only have video. But I'm glad that I got to be there as this was definitely a once in a life time opportunity :)