I've been looking forward to this day since, well 2 days ago when we decided to go. But still, excitement is excitement. Today we are headed to Potsdam! An amazing old town, known as the Fake City, outside of Berlin with some a very cool background. It holds the old KGB headquarters (which just happens to be pink and yellow and an old all girl's school), the KGB jail, a bridge where spies exchanged secret notes, Sansoucci Palace and the Dutch Quarter. It has a lot of other things, but these were just my favourite ones.
We went on a bus tour of the city, as it's quite spread out and there is a ton of information we would not have known on our own. For example, a lot of things in the city are fakes! There is what appears to be a Mosque right beside the river, but it's not actually a Mosque, it's a water pumping station built to look that way. So strange! Also, a lot of the buildings have facades on them, or are actually painted to look like they are brick buildings. Note the pink building, not real bricks.
Sansoucci Palace is not one of these places. It is beautiful and has the most amazing garden out front with a giant water fountain that is always on and has been engineered so that it will never lose water pressure. Among the beauty there is also a grave here… anyone know who's? You guessed it! Frederick the Great is buried here, next to 11 of his favourite Whippets (dogs). Nope, not his wife. Who would want that?! She's buried nice and far away. Actually Frederick only saw his wife about 2 times a year, as women were not allowed in Sansoucci Palace.
Also on this tour we learned where the Forbidden City was and saw even more of where the Berlin Wall used to stand. It's mind blowing to really think about how long that wall was and a lot of people believe it was contained to inner city Berlin.
Our last stop of the day was the Dutch Quarter. This is a section of the city that was constructed in Dutch style for the immigrants that they expected to come move to Potsdam from Holland. Although the people never came the city has been kept in good condition. Since we figured we should wander around a bit and enjoy the scenery (and try some more Dutch pastries) we decided to leave the tour here. Our lovely tour guide Yoda told us how to get back to the train station and off we went.
I had to take this picture. Please note the yellow tower... not sure if you can see the Cyclopes smiling at you... but he's there. Always there. Watching. (side note: I almost got run down taking this picture, but not by the car coming towards me, no that would be logical, there was one coming up behind me that I didn't see or hear).
Its similar to Amsterdam, but cleaner and much more upscale, so I assume this is probably what the rest of Holland looks like. While walking the pristine streets I stopped into a bakery (bรคckerie) and picked up a streusel and Christie got a waffle. Very good. Very very good.
Since today is Canada Day we had to go out for the day in proper attire (oh, did I mention the shirts we were wearing? Credit to Christie for finding them! See picture below for our Canada Day outfits). While there were stares all day long and we possibly were putting ourselves at risk for being the target of some intense pick-pocketing we did what had to be done to show the pride we have in our country. For dinner we met up with some friends from Canada at the fountain in Alexzanderplatz (NOT the fountain pictured here, I don't know what fountain this is, but it was apparently the wrong one). We had a wonderful Indian meal and a beer, simply for celebration purposes and then handed out Maple candies at the restaurant.
Thus ended my very interesting Canada Day in Berlin.
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