Ausflug to Potsdam!

Dan, Jensen, me, and Felipe at Schloss Sans Souci (Castle Without Worries)

I love day trips--you get out of the city in an hour on the Autobahn, (which I still slightly distrust, since 100 miles/hr is still too fast for me), and then, bam, you're in a completely different town with a different lifestyle and different history. At the end of the day, you come back home and take a nice long bath, crawl into bed, and dream about the day you've just had.

Potsdam is about half an hour away from Berlin, and although it's not a metropolis like Berlin, it's got its own charm and eccentricities. Our teacher and excursion guide Joerg grew up in the region, so it was cool to hear first-hand accounts and see sights that aren't in the guide-books.

You can't come to Potsdam and not see where the Potsdam Conference was held. We came too late (the museum closes at 5), but we still got to see the outside. The heads of the Allies sat at a huge round table and determined the outcome of the war here in the last Hohenzollern castle. Apparrantly tourists can't come near where Stalin sat anymore because some have brought knives and tried to chip the wood out of his chair in the past.

Now, this Russian villa looks pretty sweet, doesn't it? It was a major SS office for the Nazis. Today you don't see any signs around the house, and without a little research, one would think that it's just another millionaire's villa in Potsdam.

This picture is taken 15 meters away from the SS building. If you look closely, you'll see the Star of David on the top. It's a Jewish cemetery that was never attacked or destroyed during the Nazi regime, even though it's right next to an SS quarter. Hard to believe, isn't it?

Okay, okay, you probably want to hear something else other than history, too. So let's talk about something else: Castles! Castles! Castles! It's Germany, after all.

This is the Neue Palais (New Palace) where the first Prussian kings lived. Welcome to the palace...kitchen. No kidding, this isn't an opera house or theatre. This is where the servants cooked and slept because the aristocrats didn't like the kitchen smells. I wish my kitchen were this big. Actually, scratch that. I'll take this as my house, thank you.

Look, another castle! This one is my favorite, probably because the ghastly weather suits the dark, haunted look of the Gothic windows and Tudor tower. Dracula would have lived in it, or some haunted German romantic poet, envisioning death while he bundled himself up in blankets, or Catherine Morland from Northanger Abbey (now that I think of it, it looks exactly like Northanger Abbey).