Frankfurt, Germany — Before German reunification returned to Berlin, Bonn was the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany. Former Ambassador Gregorio G. Abad said he loved the “Bundesdorf'' ('Little Town Capital') because he could commute with ease to the ministries... and if he wanted bright lights he was only 30 minutes from Cologne... for brighter lights only one hour from Dusseldrof... and for really, really bright lights, he was only 4 hours from Hamburg!

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If frankfurters come from Frankfurt, did MacDonald hamburgers come from Hamburg?

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Foreign service wags use to quip that our diplomats assigned to the consulate general were Hamburgers and those with the embassy were Bonners!

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Times change. We rationalized our foreign service posts in Germany and closed Hamburg (proximate to our Berlin Embassy); and opened our Consulate General in Frankfurt, Lufthansa's gateway. We closed our Bonn extension office (proximate to Frankfurt), only to realize the need to service the Philippine delegation to the Climate Change Conference in Bonn.

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Ambassador Delia Albert must find a heavyweight honorary consul for Hamburg, a pivotal state in the Federal Republic and one of the most significant ports and watering hole of our seafarers.

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel celebrated a "Pan European Picnic" with Hungarian President Lazlo Solym this month to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Hungary's decision to allow East GermanS to walk across to the West unhindered by border patrols. That decision would be the beginning of the end of the Iron Curtain and would lead to the crack of the Berlin Wall.

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Hungarians were first to seize the capitalist opportunity and market strips of the barbed wire marked "Souvenir of the Iton Curtain." Germans would follow suit with chips of the Berlin Wall.

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Dramatis personae of the sequence of historical events were Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev who interposed no objection to the 'Hole in the Iron Curtain' and West German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher who would announce in September 1989 to East Germans encamped in the West German embassy in Prague that they would be allowed to cross to the West.

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President Barack Obama delivered the eulogy for Sen. Ted Kennedy, the last of the brothers. The end of an era and the torch is passed.

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