Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The walls have come down!

Today I tore out the rest of the walls. I used my Makita angle grinder with diamond tile blade. This blade was a $5 dollar on sale blade from Harbor Freight. It and the Makita have cut more tile, concrete, and any other rock things than one can ask for. Today I am sad to say that I have lost them both to natural causes. I can say no more.
Posted by littlejim at 11:08 PM

1 comment:

  1. fuzzballdaddyMarch 31, 2010 at 7:59 AM

    November 9 is considered the date the Wall fell, but the Wall in its entirety was not torn down immediately. Starting that evening, and in the days and weeks that followed, people came to the wall with sledgehammers or otherwise hammers and chisels to chip off souvenirs, demolishing lengthy parts of it in the process and creating several unofficial border crossings. These people were nicknamed "Mauerspechte" (wall woodpeckers).

    The East German regime announced the opening of ten new border crossings the following weekend, including some in historically significant locations (Potsdamer Platz, Glienicker Brücke, Bernauer Straße). Crowds on both sides waited there for hours, cheering at the bulldozers which took parts of the Wall away to reinstate old roads. Photos and television footage of these events is sometimes mislabelled "dismantling of the Wall", even though it was merely the construction of new crossings. New border crossings continued to be opened through the middle of 1990, including the Brandenburg Gate on December 22, 1989.
    West Germans curiously peer at East German border guards through a hole in the wall

    West Germans and West Berliners were allowed visa-free travel starting December 23. Until then they could only visit East Germany and East Berlin under restrictive conditions that involved application for a visa several days or weeks in advance, and obligatory exchange of at least 25 DM per day of their planned stay, all of which hindered spontaneous visits. Thus, in the weeks between November 9 and December 23, East Germans could actually travel more freely than Westerners.

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