Our wonderful police..

Oops.

 

East German customs were just unpredictable [1], Polish just slow,
Romania just very slow, Czechslovak mildly odd.


[1] From speedily efficient to locked in a windowless room with men in
leather coats shouting at you, via trippy.

 

The `good ones' don't stand up to the `bad apples', as shown in many
cases where some policemen beat confessions out of people and the
`good ones' turned a blind eye or did not report it.

 

Sheremetyevo, Christmas 1989, just as Romania went up ...

Happy days.

 

As a rule, I'd agree. However, I found the guys in Houston to be very
jovial.

 

It is indeed! perhaps he had scored some goods the night before.

I usually get a 25 stone coloured woman with absofuckinglutely NO sense
of humour with a particular hatred of Brits.

OTOH it is soooo easy from Dublin where USC has an outpost. You get all
sorts behind the desk there too but the Oirish air and the Guiness seem
to soften them up. Get through them and you walk straight past Customs
on the other side.

 

Oh that's easy.
http://tinyurl.com/6eomgl
a book most of them should be made to read too

 

You are? are you *quite* sure ;o)

 

Diana and an ex spent a year touring europe and much of the old USSR on
a BMW and didn't seem to have any major border probs. Mostly bemusement
and surprise. No black helicopters either.

 

It probably goes into much more detail than I was aware of, but I
wouldn't have said it was a 'forgotten' episode. I certainly knew about
it at school.

 

Amongst coloured folks in America?

 

This was all on foot/train and at the time of the Monday demonstrations.
Main problem month was September/October '89, IIRC.

Trips in 1990 (pre-October) by car were no problem - in fact pretty
friendly. I was let off a major piece of speeding [1] by the
Volkspolizei.


[1] 100 Kph in a 60, in a 1960 Morris 1000 [2]
[2] "Only an Englishman would come so far in something so old" [3].
[3] again: http://sweller.dynalias.org/images/mm-gdr1.jpg

 

IWHT that a 30 year old Moggy Minor would seem positively modern by
East German standards.

 

Recognised one of their own?

 

It struggled to keep up with a friends Trabant, especially on the cobbled
roads.

Amusingly, we watched from the balcony of the flat [1] as a group of
young Berlin school children argued about what GB meant and why the
steering wheel was on the wrong side.


[1] Me: "Petra, why does your flat have a balcony and no-one else does?"
Petra: "It is courtesy of the RAF"

 

They had other things on their mind at the time, I'm sure.