Two moments of déjà-vu in Berlin:

I went to the Museum of Musical Instruments the other day. It's housed in a pathetically ugly building right near where the wall used to be, and the minute I stepped through the door I knew I had been there before. Six years ago I went to a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic. I was late, the lobby was empty, and when I went to the ticket counter the seller gave me a ticket and said, "There's no time for you to pay. Just run! Run!!!" And so I ran, up a kind of vertical labyrinth of stairwells and landings and balconies, with stained glass walls and spherical light fixtures like mobiles hanging from the ceilings. At every level an usher cheered me on & pointed me to the next stairwell. I reached my seat in the brief stillness before the music began, holding my breath so as not to pant audibly.
And now the old Philharmonic is a museum. What a difference from that evening. Now the atmosphere is one of slow, quiet luxury, as if those beautiful objects, already burnished and intricately wrought, were being aged to perfection. I saw a guitar with skulls, each no bigger than small coin, carved on the side.

Then, an hour later, walking along Unter den Linden, I passed by the Meissen shop. I've walked down Unter den Linden many times in the past few years, but the last time I noticed that shop was the first time I saw it, in 1986. My parents and I had gone to East Berlin for a day trip, and my mother was tempted to buy a set of Meissen dishes, though it was hard to tell if the store was open or closed. She had bought some dishes in Prague a few years earlier, but they broke in transit. The sky was cloudy, the buildings were grey, and the Meissen shop seemed to be the only one for a very long stretch. What a contrast to yesterday, when the sky was blue and the buildings cream-colored, the treetops swung in the sunlight, and the sidewalks were crowded with café tables and ice cream eaters. (I saw the shop in July 1986, so the trees must have been in leaf then as they are now, but somehow I don't remember anything green at all.)

Another ill-fated purchase from behind the iron curtain:

A cheese cake from Poland. My parents bought an extra one for me to taste — I wasn't travelling with them — because according to my mother it was just like her mother's cheese cake, but by the time they got back to Italy the cake had gone mouldy.