Copenhagen, Denmark (1989).
Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Twenty-One: Those legendary working beers with the FDJ in the GDR.
There was a faint glow, and an aura of something flickering amid barely discernible sounds of distant people conversing in an alien language. Apparently a herd of elephants camped somewhere to the rear, occasionally bellowing fair warning.
Flat on my back and shirtless, but providentially still wearing pants, I felt sore all over, like I’d just finished running a marathon or boxing a couple of rounds with Mike Tyson.
It seemed I was marooned in a foreign land, emerging from the haze of a mysterious coma, but in fact the coma was self-induced and the destination purposeful, even if the precise whys and wherefores remained elusive.
24 hours earlier I’d spent a final evening in rigid, doomed East Berlin, drinking voluminous quantities of Wernesgrüner Pils with my friend and workmate Jeff prior to departing on the overnight train to Copenhagen.
In the company of a few dozen westerners, we had spent three weeks in the German Democratic Republic (otherwise known as East Germany) working as employees of the East Berlin parks department, followed by another week of quasi-touristic revelry in Rostock and Dresden.
Now it was September...
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