I touched the Berlin Wall

I did. I touched the Berlin Wall. I put my hand on it, actual physical contact. It was cold and powerful and ugly.

My meeting with the wall was coincidental.

The other day I set out to take my daughters to the zoo. We got to the zoo and drove around the parking lot for 40 minutes trying to find a parking spot. It was packed solid! People were creating their own parking spaces and then two cars collided in the parking lot while they were trolling around searching for a space. I drove through the lower lot, the overflow lot, the two lots nearest the zoo but aren't really for the zoo, and the streets were packed too. There was no parking! The zoo was a zoo!

Forget the zoo. We drove across Balboa Park and found a parking lot with spaces and decided to do something near there instead. The nearest museum was the Air and Space Museum. I have very little interest in planes and rockets and stuff like that, so I was encouraging the girls to walk to another one, but they like planes. I was outvoted, so we went in.

There in the Ripley's Believe It or Not section of the museum was a piece of the Berlin Wall.  It was not roped off or anything, in fact it was right along the walking path  between exhibit pieces. It was big too. 

Wow. The Berlin Wall. I remember all of the celebrations on TV when it came down. I laid my hand on it and it was amazing. I told the kids, "Look, it's a piece of the Berlin Wall." I got no response because they were looking at a motorcycle made of bones and a car made of wood. Those were way more exciting than a hunk of ugly concrete with rebar sticking out of it.

I hung our paper doll on it (Flat Stanley) and snapped a picture. The paper doll is pretty good size and he looks small on the wall.