It's been pretty quiet here today.  After all the hot dry days we've had it has been a relief to have some rain and cooler temperatures.  It reminds me of the time I spent in Berlin, Germany.  I lived very close to the Grunewald, which means Green Forest.  I arrived in Berlin the day The Wall came down.  It was quite an experience.  I saw and experienced so many things such as seeing the Kaiser-Wilhelm Church that was bombed in 1943.  And the sadness in my heart when I went to the American post office at Andrew's Barracks and saw the numbers tattooed on the man's arm that meant he had been in a concentration camp.  I rode the U-bahn and took with me a small hammer and a suitcase and when it was allowed, I went to the wall at a place not too far from where I lived and began chipping away.  I was not only taking home memorabilia, but I felt in some way I was helping to get rid of something that should never have been there in the first place.  One particular time I recall was and is still so very important to me.  My friend and I had gone to a local swimming place near her house and we laid our blanket down and acted like "stupid Americans" freaking out at all the nude people.  I kept telling her to quit staring, but to be honest, it was hard not to.  They were not all shapely women or muscled-up men.  They were families.  Grandmas and Grandpas and children.  They thought nothing of it.  There was a drunk man sitting on a fallen tree next to the river's edge and he was trying to read a newspaper, but every time he tried to hold the paper up so he could read it, he would fall over backward off of the tree.  He would get back up and start reading the newspaper again.  We had been drinking the whole day, like everyone else, and we had a little buzz on.  My friend had a bottle of Jack Daniels (her drink of choice), and I had my Bud Light.  The sun was starting to go down and we were just about to pack up and go when a young Russian couple came and started talking to us.  Of course we had no idea what they were saying, but they had a bottle of vodka and motioned to sit down.  We nodded our heads and all four of us sat cross-legged and passed our bottles around.  We all talked in our own languages and understood a little.  A little while later a couple folks from Poland came and joined our group.  They spoke a little bit of English.  Soon came a few more from Germany and the some Turkish folks.  They tried to trade me my Marlboro's for their cigarettes, but I said no thank you.  They really do smell like burning camel shit.  I never smelled burning camel shit, but it has to be bad and Turkish cigarettes smell REALLY bad.  By the time the night was over, there were people from Australia, Britain, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Germany and two American housewives who had spent an entire evening laughing, communicating and making friends without understanding much of anything that was uttered.