Potsdam II

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Although I visited Potsdam the previous weekend, I ended up doing back the next weekend again with our Art History class. Our Professor gave us an amazing tour of the city and I incorporated many of the things I learned from him into the previous entry (so as to save time and space). The city was rather unchanged from the previous weekend, but I did get to know my professor a lot better. He is a great guy, only in his early thirties, but an absolute genius who seems to know averything about everything, can speak something like 5 languages, has written a number of books and has interests in everything from music to hiking to birdwatching to modern architecture. I really enjoyed hanging out with him. To boot, he also has a very very subtle, but hilarious sense of humor. As we were touring, I learned that he likes to tell us long and convoluted “tour-guide” type stories about the history of things around the town, only to say at the end, “Wouldn’t it be great if that was true…but its not. They only have stories like that so that tour-guides have something to tell their tours.”

He also pointed out a number of interesting things that I did not see the last time I was in Potsdam. One is a set of fake Roman ruins that Charles the Great built across the valley from his palace. Apparently the were there to remind him that he was a philosopher (a rather strange thing to remind a king of). He also pointed out to us the grave of Charles the great, along with all 6 of his hunting dogs. For some reason, people had put potatoes on the grave stone. My professor said that legend says that is because Charles the Great was important in introducing the potato into the German diet. Whether that is true or not is debatable.

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