Potsdam

This morning we dragged ourselves out of bed early so that we could get a jump on the day. We then proceeded to take two hours to get ourselves out of the house, so...maybe tomorrow we'll just sleep in. In any case, we took the bus to a little train station called Grunewald (Green Forest) that looked like a military bunker inside. Then we took the train out to Potsdam, which is a little town about 45 min (by train) out of Berlin. The town was once the summer residence of German royalty, so I wanted to go primarily because I thought we might see a palace.

When we arrived in Potsdam we immediately got ourselves turned in the wrong direction- we saw a group of people heading off and figured they must be going the same way we wanted to. Just for future reference, this is not a valid way to navigate. After we managed to get turned in the right direction, our first view of the old city center of Potsdam was...well, as you can see in the picture, the buildings are impressive, but there is a ton of construction going on right at the entrance to the city, which is maybe less impressive. According to the guidebook they are constructing a building to house the government of Potsdam on the site of a former palace, which was torn down by the Soviets.

Despite our misgivings we persisted and eventually found ourselves in a pretty shopping district with lots of those little bakeries that Alan is so fond of, and tons of other fun shops. There was one store with an entire wall of different kinds of tea! It actually reminded me a lot of

Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island. We found a fruit market, and a cathedral, but no palace(there are several of them there, so I guess we just weren't looking hard enough!). The architecture was an interesting mix of 18th century neoclassical and 1950's Soviet concrete block. It was fun to walk around and I walked in to a bakery and ordered myself a jelly doughnut in German. It was delicious, and also the first time a shopkeeper has understood what I was asking for the first time I asked. Interesting tidbit: as many Americans know, the jelly doughnut is known as a Berliner in most of Germany- however, in Berlin it is called a pfannkuchen.

Finally it got too hot and we jumped back on the train and came home. The day sort of fizzled after that- the only thing we really accomplished this evening was a shopping trip to H&M.