The Most Interesting Place

I was recently working on comparatives and superlatives (like "big/bigger/the biggest" and "beautiful/more beautiful/the most beautiful") with one of my English students and the book we were using posed various questions for the sake of practicing these forms. For example: "What's the most interesting place you've ever been?"

What a question, actually. The single most interesting place? The student pondered whether perhaps New Zealand would count – beautiful, certainly, and they had a great time there, but is it the most interesting?

Then he said, "I think the most interesting place was the other side of the wall." (He's in his late 40's and spent the first half of his life in East Germany.)

He told me about friends of theirs who lived in a building directly abutting the Berlin Wall; going to the bathroom or the kitchen in their apartment was a particular highlight, because from those windows, you could look straight down on the no man's land along the wall and watch the soldiers marching back and forth on their patrols. ("I thought only Stasi members were allowed to live that close to the border?" I asked. "I thought so too," he said, but somehow he can't imagine that was true in the case of this couple.)

They used to sit on their friends' balcony, look out across the wall - looking at West Berlin, which was no further away than the other side of the street, yet completely off-limits - and say, Someday we'll walk down that street. Someday we'll go to that bar on the corner.

And then, years later, the wall came down, and they did.