Blogs from Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany, Europe - page 2

Geo: 52.397, 13.0586Sansoucci Palace and Gardens are Germany's equivalent of Versailles in France, built as a summer palace for the Prussian Kings. After wandering around the extensive gardens for the morning, we headed for Colditz Castle, the infamous prison for Allied WWII prisoners who continually escaped. There were very few escapes from Colditz. Unfortunately we couldn't access Colditz due to the river being in flood. Continued on to Dresden.... read more

Berlin…………..another year on! Berlin Schonefeld was busier, but we are not talking Heathrow. The locals are all still called Jack Wolfskin and the transport got off to a good start this time with the first Airport Express into the city not being cancelled. We were a Kleingruppe this time ……………15.50 Euros for an all day ticket in ABC…… the ticket system looked familiar, although pressing the English flag button always helps. The first port of call was the Hertha BSC ticketshop near Zoogarten. Borussia Dortmund were Saturday’s visitors and tickets had been selling like hot cakes. The previous high crowd was only just over 62,000, so there was plenty of capacity to go around was the confident stance. Alas not, there were precisely 22 left ….. yes 22 tickets out of 74,400! And they were mostly ... read more

Day 11 Driving through Poland was sooooo booooring! It's just like Nebraska. The only thing interesting was the forest right before we reached the border where people had foraged for mushrooms and were selling them on the side of the road. Nothing in the world feels better than Germany right now! At 3:00 we arrived in Beelitz, the sparglestadt of Germany (the white asparagus capital). But we weren't there for the asparagus, we were there to explore the Beelitz-Heilstätten Sanatorium. A huge abandonded hospital complex with tons of wonderful run down buildings which means lots of wonderful pictures. We tried to get in one of the main buildings but since we didn't bring a flashlight we couldn't make it up out of the basement, it was really dark. We had so much fun! Walhalla hotel in ... read more

Back in Berlin, we spend one night at Alex's place, who was kind enough to help us out again. We meet his Portuguese girlfriend Amelia, whose German is coming along quite nicely, and whose English is just about perfect. She says Alex always tells her how bad her German is and constantly corrects her. I guess that's probably just his way of being pedagogic, in his rough German kind of way. The following day, we finally go to our first of the five museums on Museumsinsel, the New Museum. Its most famous exhibit is the 3300-year old iconic bust of Nofretete (I prefer to use the German term, as 'Nefertiti' looks and sounds odd to me), which is a stunningly beautiful work of art of a real hot chick, especially taking into consideration how old she ... read more

The Hohenzollerns sure had it good. Till they didn't. All those Friedrichs, Wilhelms, and of course Friedrich Wilhelms, along with their wives and children, left their mark on Berlin and environs, most notably Potsdam. This weekend sort of became, for me, a theme tour of the Hohenzollerns' palaces and pleasure gardens. But intertwined with all that sumptuous Prussian-ness it was hard not to notice the impact of more recent history on these remnants of Germany's imperial past. I began the Hohenzollern Tour on Saturday in the west Berlin neighborhood of Charlottenburg, so named for Schloss Charlottenburg. It was originally built as a summer palace for Queen Sophie-Charlotte, wife of Friedrich III (later King Friedrich I - confused yet?), and was apparently meant as Berlin's version of Versailles. Well....um... At the very least, it is the largest ... read more