This morning I did something that I would have been arrested for if I had done it 20 years ago: I jogged into "East Germany".

Yesterday I took a train to Berlin for a Sabbath Bible study with our small group in Berlin. A couple of our regulars were missing because of holiday travel over the long weekend (Friday and Monday are holidays here). I forgot my half-price "Bahncard" for the trip, which meant that I should have had to pay the extra 50 percent for my ticket. But the conductor was nice about it – even though it was against the rules! – and didn’t ask me to pay the extra fare. In exchange I gave him a quick English lesson before I got off the train in Berlin.

Before traveling on to Hamburg for our church service there tomorrow on the last day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, I wanted to jog. My Spandau hotel is not far from where the Berlin wall used to be, so I just jogged down to "Heer" street and took off in a westerly direction. Sure enough, after several hundred meters I was near the old border. At one point there was a path called the "Grenzweg" leading off into the woods. It still is somewhat of an unusual feeling to walk (or jog) in a location where the dividing line ran between the two main power blocks during the Cold War.