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Published: February 25th 2008
The Best Part of Wakin' Up
is super-charged German coffee from the breakfast buffet.
The breakfast room was much more crowded this Saturday morning. It looked like a lot of other tourists had stayed for the weekend. Everyone that walked into the room mumbled "Guten Morgen" at the other breakfasters while no one seated replied. A very odd custom. What was especially nice though was that none of the other diners ever even looked our way or got in my way as I loaded, reloaded and reloaded my plate full of cheese, meat, rolls and soft-boiled eggs. By the end of our visit to the breakfast trough I felt bloated and sleepy.
This was to be our last few hours in Berlin. While Cassie waited in the hotel, Gen, Tyler, Grandma, Gail and I headed out to get our rental van at Avis' Downtown The Art of Subterfuge
When on a mission in Berlin one must blend in unobstrusively with the local inhabitants. I think I did a fine job of remaining incognito. location. Just a few steps past our hotel we saw that the corner liquor store was already open for business. Some extremely cheap Schnapps prices enticed us inside. While Gen and Tyler checked-out the inexpensive beers Gail and I spotted reproductions of old tin signs advertising beer and hotels. For once we used our heads and decided that it would be much wiser to buy stuff AFTER we picked-up the car instead of lugging it around across town.
After assuring the Asian proprietor in my broken German that we'd be back later, we made our way up to the U-Bahn for the last time. Once again it was a very, very short wait for our train to Alexanderplatz. And once again the car was nearly empty. I wasn't 100% sure whether our 48 hour transport pass was still valid on our third day. Is it good for the 48 consecutive hours after you buy it or is it good for two days? It didn't matter how the rule was interpreted because no one ever checked.
We had to change U-Bahn lines at Alexanderplatz, but first we went up into the station shopping arcade where I had seen a
It Still Looks Tempting Months Later
Gail and I would've been happy to move into the Agon Hotel permanently and just sit in the Fruhstuckzimmer all day long. Take a look at all the cereal bins and the variety of butter. margarine, jam, jelly and other spreads. pharmacy. For months I had been reading testimonials from posters at
Fodor's European travel website extolling the miraculous healing powers of
"Voltaren Emulgel" . People claimed that it rid everything from muscle pain to torn ligaments. One guy had a hairline fracture of his leg that was suddenly pain-free after only a couple applications of this stuff. Available only by prescription in the U.S. and costing upwards of $35 a tube, I had made a note to myself to buy a tube while on vacation. My injured heel was still sore and I hoped this would be a cure-all. As soon as I approached the pharmacist and began my inquiry in halting German, she instantly asked me what I needed in perfect English. I expected I might have to go into a long spiel about my pain and discomfort, but as soon as I said "Voltaren Emulgel", she turned right around and pointed at a huge display featuring the product. She had a toothpaste sized tube for 4 Euro and a monster-sized version for 7. I got one of each. The container called it "Voltaren Schmerz Gel" which means pain gel. The pharmacist said the stuff was fantastic. She was surprised to
Cassie Gets Pensive
Party pooper Cassie decided that she would wait back at the hotel while the rest of us went across town to collect our rental van. hear how much it cost back home and the fact that it required a prescription.
From there it was back to the U-Bahn and another short trip to the Jannowitzbrucke stop. This put us in a rather drab commercial part of town. I'm assuming it was in the old East Berlin because the buildings looked like downtown Newark. Using my GPS which I had pre-programmed with almost every single place I anticipated us visiting, we headed ESE down Holzmarktstrasse. The dreariness of the area and the wide boulevard with almost no vehicular traffic made me think Nuvi or I had goofed, but soon Eagle-eyed Gen spotted the Avis sign. It took only a few minutes to announce ourselves, decline
the over-priced insurance, waive-off the 10 Euro a day gouging fee for snow tires (what were they gonna do - put them on the one and only 9 passenger van on the lot while we waited ?), refuse their inflated rental price for their GPS and sign a waiver granting permission to take the car into the old Iron Curtain countries. The van we were given was better than I had hoped for: it was huge, diesel, brand new and
Does This Kid Ever Stop Sleeping?
Not only was Tyler the last to get up and shower, he had to also take a snooze at breakfast. Five minutes after we got into the van he was asleep again. had all kinds of buttons to play with on the dashboard. It was the first time I ever drove an Opel. I learned later that the car rental companies don't let you drive their fancier Mercedes and BMWs
into the crime-ridden Eastern Bloc countries.
Immediately Nuvi made me grateful for having spent half a grand on her. She easily guided us up some incredibly wide avenues lined with huge Soviet-style apartment buildings on our way back to the Agon Hotel. The whole area looked totally different than the perspective we gained emerginging from the subway. We were extremely fortunate finding a free parking space just a few steps from the hotel. First we ran into the Asian-German liquor store
where we got a nice souvenir sign for the rec room for only 5 Euro. Gen and Tyler grabbed a couple beers. From there we gathered our luggage and our straggler, visited the front desk where we made sure there were no hidden charges for our pre-paid hotel, then made our way to Potsdam.
I really wasn't sure what we'd do in Potsdam. I didn't research this part of the trip because I thought we'd just drive straight to
So Much for the Diet
Gail's strict diet almsot fell by the wayside on this trip, but she found enough healthy junk at breakfast to stay within the confines of her regime. While the rest of us devoured hard rolls, eggs, cold cuts, hot chocolate and cheeses, Gail filled herself with Muesli and coffee. our hotel in Colditz. But we had gotten our van so quickly and left the hotel so easily that it looked like we had time to make a stop along the way. As we tried to get out of town we were unwittingly lured into a different kind of stop by a blue and yellow Lidl sign. I justified the stop by pointing out that all stores would be closing around noon on this Saturday, they would remain closed all day Sunday and might not even be open the next day (Christmas Eve). With Christmas and Boxing Day following that we might not get to do any shopping for close to a week! Inside Lidl we loaded-up a shopping cart full of Bounty candy bars, soda, Nutella, cheese, salami, beer, wine, bath products and other chocolates. Tyler and Gen were as bad as Gail and I. They also know bargains when they see them. Meanwhile Grandma and Cassie tried not to look too bored with the whole thing.
That took almost an hour. By the time we got to Potsdam it was already 2:00 in the afternoon. Because we didn't really know what we wanted to see and do
Reminder of the Halcyon Days of Communism
Our route to the Avis city office took us to the Jannowitzbruecke U-Bahn stop. While most of the stops in the more touristy parts of town seemed less spartan, this very quiet station still looked like something from the Golden Age of Socialism. Extremely drab and dismal. here we simply drove around town hoping we'd see something that piqued our interest. Finally we passed by Sansoucci Palace. On an increasingly dreary-looking day with the threat of precipitation in the air I was in a bit of a hurry to get to Colditz before things got too ugly. Instead of getting out of the car, paying to park, then paying to go into the palace grounds for what would be a very abbreviated tour this late in the day, I tried to find somewhere along the side of the road where we might snap a few photos. Obviously the local administrators of the site didn't want anyone doing that very thing because there was nowhere to pull over anywhere near the palace. The others took pictures as I slowly rolled by. Finally Tyler picked-up one of the tour books I had brought and read about some of the other charms of Potsdam. At one time a rather significant Russian population lived here and left their mark on the area. In trying to find some of these attractions I ended-up on a one way street going through a very upscale residential district. Unable to turn around we kept going
Vantastic Rental
A few years ago we had a bad experience with a car rental when the renting agency claimed we did damage to our car. We claimed that the car was scratched and dented when we picked it up. Now we take photos before and after just in case they try the same ploy again. I was extremely happy when I saw just how big and roomy our Opel van was. The fact that it took diesel was also a huge plus. on an ever narrowing road that eventually turned from macadam to stone to gravel and then to dirt as we emerged in a pasture. We simply continued onward going through a section of town full of those little vegetable gardens ("Schrebergartens") that German city-dwellers love to manage. After World War II when Germany was in ruins and most of the population starving, the government offered people small plots of land to grow their own food. The idea proved very popular with the nature-loving Germans. Today even though they are among the richest people in the world Germans still escape their apartments to tend their little Schrebergartens, often spending warm summer nights tilling their tiny fields.
Somehow we returned to civilization. We found signage pointing the way to a Russian Orthodox church. While Cassie and I stayed in the car and kept warm, the rest of the crew hopped-out to take a look at the church and graveyard. Our new tour guide, Tyler, brought his group back from this excursion then directed me to the other side of town. Here we found a small village called "Alexandrowka". Built in 1826 as a tribute from Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm III to his
Getting Out of Berlin
After our mini-shopping spree at Lidl we followed Nuvi's directions out of town toward Potsdam. Somewhere along the way we passed this huge statue suspended above the river. friend, the Russian Czar Alexander, this little enclave consists of 12 homes built in the Russian peasant style. When we hopped out of the vehicle
to take a few snaps my heel suddenly felt as painful as it had the day after I fell off the loading dock. As the trip went on my heel began to hurt more and more because of the gas pedal position in the van. Fortunately, the pain subsided after a few minutes of walking around on it.
It was already turning dark when we decided to leave Potsdam. Once again we found another place that we felt we would have to return to someday. The 2 hour trip from Potsdam to Colditz was rather uneventful and definitely boring. Everyone dozed off including the driver at one point. Most of the ride was along the Autobahn where the biggest excitement came when we got stuck in a Stau (traffic jam). By the time we turned off of the Autobahn and on to the two lane road leading to Colditz, it was completely dark. It was a little hairy negotiating the twisting road through village after village out in farm country. Most of the time
Mercy Me. It's Sansoucci
It was impossible to pull off the road to take any pictures or to just look at any of the buildings comprising the immense one time summer retreat of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Sansoucci was built in the mid-18th Century as a Rococo version of the much larger Versailles palace of Louis XIV. Gail took this picture of part of the gardens for me as we buzzed by. I had a local riding my butt as I tried to make out the contours of the road while only travelling 10-20 miles over the speed limit. Just after 6 o'clock we could make out the yellowish orange lights of a castle on a hilltop. With the varied turns and hills of the road semingly taking us further away from what I had thought was Colditz Castle, I began to wonder about the accuracy of my GPS. But after descending into a river valley and following the course of the Mulde a few miles, we soon spotted the same castle looming in the near distance. The old town of Colditz wasn't much more than a half dozen cobble-stoned blocks yet somehow we got lost. After reversing our route we found the one way alley which led to the
"Alten Stadtmauer " .
We weren't sure we were expected as we pulled-up and saw an almost totally dark pension. Then out of the darkness of the parking lot Big Ralf came striding toward us with a big smile on his face. A very congenial innkeeper, he showed us to our rooms, asked when we wanted to breakfast, promised to tell us all
The World's Fanciest Windmill
I won't even guess why this immense structure sits on the Sansoucci grounds. Maybe next year if/when we actually get out and look around I'll learn its significance. about the history of the Colditz POW camp that had been situated in that big castle on the hill, then suggested where we might find a good restaurant.
The dining place Ralf directed us to was just around the corner. First we walked up the hill to the bank. Not knowing whether this restaurant would accept our credit cards we decided to stock up on a few Euro. We were a little surprised that out here in the boonies they actually had a room full of ATM machines. We had no problem withdrawing a couple hundred Euro. We were starving by now so we headed back in the direction Ralf had directed us. We found the Sophienklause easily and grabbed the door handle to go inside...locked. Inside a few lights were on. No signs on the door saying "geschlossen". We knocked. No response. Double-checking the sign we saw we were in the right place. We knocked again. Still no answer. Just as I was starting to
wonder about what alternative eatery we might find in this teensy little town, Tyler and Gen knocked yet again. Finally a little old man came to the door. I cringed thinking he was
My One and Only Photo of Sansoucci
We tried to find a place to park across the street from the palace entrance, but there were no free spots. I didn't feel like paying a couple Euros just to take a few photos. As we pulled out of the lot I saw this busker entertaining the rich folks who could afford the price of parking and palace admission. gonna go off into some undecipherable jabber while gesticulating for us to get the hell away from his closed restaurant. Instead he almost smiled and motioned us inside. We found the biggest table then made ourselves comfortable. The barkeep/waiter/owner gave us surprisingly big menus for such a little establishment. We started with the now usual round of beers. Our food came quickly and was absolutely delicious. It ended-up being one of the best meals of the trip. We had the whole place to ourselves which gave us the time to look around and explore the Irish-German decor throughout the room. The cost for the night of entertainment? 83.70 Euro for 6 people. This included 9 beers, 1 glass of white wine, 5 Goulasch soups, 3 Jagerschnitzels, 1 Bockwurst platter, 1 pork cutlet, 1 Coke and a beefsteak. At current prices that's about $120.00, but that also included the tip.
We weren't quite ready for bed yet so we walked through the little town square past all the closed shops then up the hill past the bank. We continued up the moderately steep hill until we found ourselves in front of the Castle/POW camp. We took a few pictures of
More of the Gardens
Wikipedia says this is one of two collonades that form the Northern entrance. the spotlighted castle and a nearby church. We checked and re-checked the operating hours of the castle and learned that we would be able to tour the grounds the next day (You can't be too sure around Christmastime in Germany).
Thoroughly frozen by now we walked back to the Alten Stadtmauer. It was nice and warm in our rooms, but Cassie didn't want to have any part of my snoring so she joined Gail and her mother on the third bed in the biggest room. Spending a few moments to look through the Colditz Story I readied myself for the next mornings tour. With complete quiet and under a comfy down comforter I fell asleep immediately.
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