Potsdam

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It is only October, but already the days are starting to get shorter here and the nip in the air tells me that winter is only around the corner. In my last weekends of good weather, I am trying to make as much use of it as I can and do as many day-trips as possible. So this weeks was an excursion to Potsdam, which is a smaller city in the suburbs of Berlin. I took the S-bahn train there and got off around mid-day. I spent the day wandering around Potsdam and looking at the history that is just sitting there.

Potsdam gained its significance in the 18th century when Charles the Great decided to take up residence there in his palace Sansounci, which is one of the crown features of Potsdam. Over the years, he and other royal families built up a slew of palaces and other landmarks in Potsdam until today, a good chunk of the city is actually a huge park that has about a dozen palaces and other buildings of interest in it. I wanded around the park for a while and saw some pretty amazing baroque palaces. I am not the hugest fan of baroque architecture, but nevertheless found a number of these palaces to be quite beautiful. Sansounci is particularly pretty. On the other side of town there is another similar park with a great palace that was built in the Tudor style of an English country house, though much bigger. I really liked that building. It also was imprtant historically as the place where the Big Three met in 1945 to make the Potsdam Treaty, an important treaty with important repurcussions for the rest of the 21st century.

Potsdam was also interesting because of the other random artifacts that just got scattered around these parks and the city. Some Lord or Lords definitely had a thing for Egyptian architecture because there were several Egyptian style obelisks around the town and even a small pyramaid! There were also a number of interesting churches, a gothic gate and a quaint section of town known as the Dutch quarter, which Charles the Great had built so that technology-savvy Dutch could come and help with the building of his palaces and the economy of Prussia.

Almost as interesting to me as the palaces were the non-touristy parts of town. Here one sees a much different view of Potsdam - old buildings from the before the second world war that are practically falling apart as well as mass-produced high-rise housing from the socialist era, which too are showing the wear of their age. It is definitely a poorer area than Berlin, and has not seen as much re-development as East Berlin.

I had a slight adventure near the end when I attempted to buy some rasberries from a food stall in the center of town. The guy behind the desk saw my “Dublin” jacket that I was wearing and made some comment about how he hated Ireland. I didn’t really know how to respond, but laughed it off and just said that I had never actually been there and actually come from the states. This precipiated a long and very hard to follow conversation between me and the guy and his friend in the store about everything from 9/11 to Mike Tyson to Germany and Turkey. Actually it was more of a lecture because I did not get many chances to actually respond to their rambling. The guys were both Turkish and unfortunately did not speak particularly clear German and their English was even worse so it was little hard to understand, but the main points of their lecture seemed to be as follows:
- Mike Tyson is a muslim
- Mike Tyson is also a really good boxer (I think they meant to show some sort of connection here).
- Islam is a very peaceful religion.
- They do not like Germany and want to move back to Turkey as soon as they get rich.
- Someday I will become a Muslim. (This last fact was a little surprising to me since I really have not given any consideration to converting to Islam and am actually quite happy as a Christian. Nevertheless they were very adament that since Malcolm X was an American and had switched to Islam from Christianity, then I too, as an American, would do the same).
It was an interesting experience to say the least. I finally extricated myself and walked back to the trainstation, slightly weirded out and slightly amused. The relationship between Turkey and Germany is an interesting one to say the least.

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