A childhood belief about places

In early 1990, our school was one of the first from the West to visit the former GDR after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having grown up to fear the horrors of communism, we fully believed that everyone in the GDR must be starving and miserable, and when our minibus approached Halle, we were all terrified because we thought we'd be staying in these tiny little sheds, crammed up close together, with miniscule plots of land in front of them, where they were growing cabbages because there was nothing else to eat. It was only when we reached the city centre that we discovered that these were people's gardening allotments and that everyone lived in normal flats with electricity, hot water, toilets and shop-bought food, and had done for the past few decades.