After Julia’s morning run (I have no idea how she is
managing so much exercise on top of our 20K+ steps walking days), we headed to
a place Rachel found for breakfast called Brot and Butter that is said to have
the best bread in town. The bread is
good and they are generous with it. It
is a deli but they did have a vegetarian plate with different spreads to top the
bread. They were good but a little
strange too. I’m glad we went, but don’t
need to go back.
To break up our time in the city, we decided today would be
a good day to take one of our daytrips and chose Potsdam, the holiday spot for
Prussia’s royal family and site of several Frederick the Great palaces. It wasn’t
until we got all the way to the ticket center that we realized that one of the
two major palaces (the most impressive New Palace) is actually closed on
Tuesdays and that our entry time for the more intimate Sanssouci Palace wouldn’t
be until three hours later. I was pretty
upset with myself for not having read that more carefully and my first instinct
was to head back to Berlin and come back down to Potsdam another day. Thankfully I quickly recognized the folly of
that idea and we got back in line to buy
tickets for the open palaces and decided to spend the time looking around the
many other palaces the prolific builder Frederik the Great had built in Park
Sanssouci.
 |
| Not only did we go on Tuesday - you are supposed to go on a sunny day as well! |
The first one we arrived at was the Orangerie – where they
move the orange and palm and other trees into in the winter months. You can
only enter with a tour group and the tours are only run in German, but they
give out a sheet of paper with English descriptions to follow along. Before getting started on the tour, they give
you these huge slippers that fit over your street shoes to protect the
floors. It is nearly impossible to walk
normally in the slippers and not try your hand at moon walking, the splits, or
just gliding around, especially when you have three sentences worth of description
in English to the guide’s 5-10 minutes of explanation in German. We were good for the first couple of rooms
but then it just got to be funny. In our
giggling, we met a super friendly teen from Australia and her mom, who were
visiting their former German exchange student.
He was able to help explain a little of what they were talking
about.
After this tour, they kindly walked us down to the New
Chambers, another palace made specifically to house all of Frederick’s guests
after he ran out of space at Sanssouci. (On
the way we learned that they are farmers in Australia and that the dad of the
family is on a farm tour of the United States – very nice people!) Thankfully
the tour at New Chambers came with an English audioguide. By the time we got through it though there
was no time for lunch before our 2:45 start time at Sanssouci. Rachel had brought along some sustenance
snacks (Amsterdam cheese and crackers) that got us through. I felt Sanssouci, the actual summer holiday
residence of the king, was a little more tastefully done Rococo than the over
the top styles we’d seen earlier this trip.
When we finished that audiotour, we felt ready to head back to Berlin rather
than see even more of the structures/galleries/museums/palaces in Park
Sanssouci. We know we missed the best
palace of the lot (no need to rub it in) but it turned out to be an ok thing that
it was closed…we’ve seen a lot of palaces and castles on this trip. 
We took the train back to Berlin and got off near the Kaiser
Wilhelm Memorial Church, a church that was bombed during World War II and was
left as it looked at the end of the war as a reminder of the destruction of
Berlin. Most of the cities we have been
in suffered significant damage during the war, but have been rebuilt. So, this was very interesting to see and
imagine what the whole city must have looked like. Next to the remains of the old
church a new one has been built. The
walls of the new church and bell tower are made up of 11,000 blue tiles, a gift
from France. The Madonna sketch made by a German army doctor during a
particularly bad time to comfort the men in his care hangs here with copies in
the Berlin Cathedral, England, and Russian. The artist did not survive the war,
but his drawing on the back of a map did.
After looking around the church we started walking down West
Berlin’s major shopping street – Kurfurstendam but not being big shoppers we
realized that if we headed to East Berlin’s main shopping area we could get to
Ritter Sport again and I could get that white chocolate bar mixed in ice cream
I so wanted the day before. Sadly, we
arrived at 6:09 and they stopped taking ice cream orders at 6:00…I was
seriously disappointed! But we used the
opportunity to buy more chocolate and look for Birkenstocks (which are half the
price here!). We didn't find the perfect pair, but I knew that wouldn't happen on the first trip.
We wanted to get back to our neighborhood to eat in one of
the cute restaurants we walk by every morning on way to the U-Bahn. As we were strolling through Rachel found a
highly reviewed Indian restaurant near our house but on the opposite side. We walked there (discovering this fun
fountain surrounded by people enjoying the sun, which had finally come
out). It’d been a while since we had
Indian, and the food was delicious but the service was awful. It took over an
hour to get our food. We stopped in a
grocery store on the way home and found the cereal I loved so much in Italy –
Nestle Fitness – can’t wait for breakfast tomorrow! 
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