Dear Christ Church,

In High School I was an exchange student in eastern Germany, and my short time there made a permanent impression. The people, food, language and culture were mind-blowing, but one of the surprising things that has stuck with me is the old communist aesthetic that lingers in much of eastern Europe. Those old buildings seemed to be stuck in a recently forgotten world, and for me, it was the first time that I saw that much of the world looked and felt so different than my tiny sliver in Northwest Georgia. For the record, I am no fan of the Soviet Union, or the authoritarian paranoid police state was East Germany, and I have no living memory of the Cold War as I was just a toddler when the wall came down and the Soviet system collapsed. Perhaps it was the fact that I didn’t have these memories that I was so fascinated with what everyday life looked like for the people in the East just over a decade before I arrived. I met people who actively worked toward the destruction of Soviet system, and those who still lamented its demise, but all around me there was evidence of the monstrous entity that just didn’t wake up one day. The people that lived under its ever-watchful eye were now free, and they started to look like and sound like everyone else.