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Hi all, a thread about good memories of people and/or events or whatever you remember still so well since it felt so good at the time. Share with us in telling and making us smile for you. Short or long story, just a thought or a massive missive... just personal and happy is the requirement. Kind regards, page (in a sentimental mood I guess…) Maybe a few of you might remember my story about a school trip. it still makes me happy thinking about it. It involves music. One year at what you’d call highschool I changed schools. It wasn’t really like I felt I did belong at my present school, a really big one. It felt like students were numbers instead of people, a factory we’d call those around here. I was a very shy girl. At home I wasn’t the easiest one, a rebel sometimes but never like that at school, I was so eager to learn! It was really an impulsive feeling that I had to follow up to. I went to a very small school in our capital city. I knew someone who used to go there and always had liked his stories about it. The kids in my new class were all different, there were all kinds and that was just great. They came from all kinds of environments. They had different looks but all got along, and that made me feel at home right away. After a month my class went on a camp. It was a trip to what then still was East-Germany. I didn’t really have the money to pay for the trip, but the school did find it important that every student went, so they payed half for mine so I could go. As we crossed the border, soldiers with heavy arms got on our bus to check and looked at each of us individually. It was really scary. One girl with punky hair had to move her hair out of her face so the soldier could see if it was her on her passport. They asked if we had anything to declare, of course we didn’t tell about the books we smuggled in for some of our teacher’s friends in the country. We didn’t get caught. We stayed at Weimar and Berlin that week. We visited the house of Goethe, went to a play of Bertolt Brecht, talked to a student group, played soccer, that kind of thing. We also visited the place where the concentration-camp Buchenwald was in the war. There was this boy in my class which opened up to me as we went to this last place. His family didn’t really want him to visit the concentration-camp because part of their family was killed there. I don’t know why he told me at that moment. Maybe it was because I was just there, a new face with no knowledge of anything of that. Sometimes it is just easier to talk to a stranger, I guess. I walked through the camp and stayed with him the whole time. I didn’t want him to see all of this by himself. We were allowed to just walk through the exhibition by ourselves. I guess he much appreciated that because we talked a lot for the rest of the week. Not just about that visit and his family but about all sort of things. He just seemed to look at me different from then. The last couple of days we visited Berlin and stayed at a hotel on the west side. We arrived there really late at the hotel but him and me, we went walking to look at the city. That was probably a dumb thing to do, but we didn’t realize that at that time. I remember West Berlin looked so enormous commercial to me, I liked the east better as it was more simple. That may sound strange, but it was really an enormous difference. The last evening we stayed up very late just doing things kids like to do, having fun, talking and fooling around with our classmates. The next morning the bus left at 7, it was a 12 hour drive to our school. I slept a bit on the bus. I don’t know why it was but there weren’t many of us in class who had brought some music on the trip. But there was 1 tape which was on the whole week, while we were driving. On it was a song by Spandau Ballet called True. I remember we were driving to Amsterdam on the highway and he asked me to dance. So we slow danced on the bus. I don’t know if that’s the right word but think you’ll understand. He didn’t get to be my boyfriend, we didn’t even kiss but there was some sort of mutual respect. Which was really nice. So when I hear that song, usually when played at the end of the year there are lots of old songs on the radio, I remember that dance, the trip and my great year there at that school.