The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2019 65 was still miserably cold and rainy. I really needed to relax after the music festival. I won’t keep you guessing. With some regrets, certainly, we chose the Canaries over history—and, I have to admit, we had a great week there, with only a couple of guilt pangs in the mix. The following Sunday, Nov. 19, when we made our way from Hanover airport to the central city, we were rewarded with one of the most astonishing, wondrous sights we had ever beheld. Germany had extremely strict Sunday-closing laws; about the only place you could buy anything on Sundays was a very small shop in the central railway station. But on that Sunday, all the downtown department stores and shops were “OFFEN,” wel- coming East Germans to load up on the necessities and luxuries that they had so long been denied. Germans from East and West—you could tell them apart by their clothing—were strolling together, laughing and hugging. Rattletrap East German Trabants, previously a rare sight on West German roads, were everywhere, parked among local Porsches, VWs, Mercedes—or, occasionally, even just left aban- doned. The atmosphere was electric, and although the celebra- tory mood didn’t last terribly long, on that day (cold, but not rainy) the whole thing seemed like some kind of miracle, nearly as good as having been in the Big City on the Big Day itself. Prior to joining USIA in 1975, Ray Orley was a college drama instruc- tor in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was in Hanover, West Germany, in 1989 and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The “Music Days U.S.A.” square dance event in Hanover in late October 1989 drew many enthusiastic dancers. COURTESYOFRAYORLEY COURTESYOFRAYORLEY The author holding the poster for the Amerika-Haus “Music Days U.S.A.” program in Hanover.