Art Otel Potsdam

Took the train down to Potsdam today. We wanted to see Sans souci and around the town. S bahn trains in Berlin are not running so we had to catch a regional and we managed in time to just catch the one going to Potsdam Hauptbahnhof. Then hubby saw that it also went to Potsdam Sans souci Park so we stayed on it until we got there.
Off the train at the park and had to walk almost a kilometer to get to the New Palace. Since that was on our list of things ...

... King Frederick was still alive we wouldn't have taken Germany - so he was well known through the ages in these parts. He was also a lover of the arts and of the flute. We visited his grave, which is on site at Sans Soucci. He is buried next to his several Italian Greyhounds. The New Palace was last on the list and it is a massive 4 story building probably twice the size of Kensington Palace - a massive structure with statues all ...

... with malte. This was before I realized how much german guys loved me. We started drinking in the garden there, not for any reason but because that is how we did things. Then we finally decided to leave, after the rest of our group had departed. This was where the trouble began. We kept trying to get to certain lines, but it never worked out. We ended up getting on wrong bus after wrong bus, and eventually we rode way out into the middle of ...

... most of the day and I somehow managed with everything. I answered few phones and the most surprising thing was that I understood most of the things that people well telling to me. So the sentence I used the most often today was "Sprechen Sie englisch?":P Fortunately most of the people can speak English:P I was also translating a German text and managed to do it without any problems, and I was talking on the phone with Polish Minister of Transportation ...

... walk around on the roof. Then you can enter the dome. They have this giant funnel thing with all these mirrors right in the center. You walk up a series of ramps to get to the top. As you go up, you can look down onto the German Parliament if they're in session. That glass dome is supposed to represent the transparancy of the new German government. When you get up top, there re some amazing views of Berlin. The top is a big hole, and directly underneath ...

... to look at. Something that I found very angering was that someone (probably kids) had come along and smashed all the statues to bits: all the fingers, all the penises, all the objects in the hands of the statues were missing throughout the entire park. It was a shame because some of them were really interesting except for the fact that he or she had half a hand or whatever. After this, there isn't much I can say about the day; look at the pictures.

... already well into his cups, Reinhart (just a friend) the more sober one. They were convinced I was Finnish. No matter what I said, they wouldn't believe otherwise. Reinhart, a very handsome man in his 60's, graying hair, tall, craggy and tan, kept laughing at Klaus. Klaus, shorter than I with a blonde flat top and very large beer belly, was boisterous and kept insisting that American's can't speak English. "Venever ou speak, all comes out is ****", apparently we don't have the ...

... that the free Fan Mile wouldn't be packed full with people, we hopped back on the bus, then on the S-Bahn, and returned eastward. We found enough room for our two rear-ends to fit on the concrete base of a large light post within sight of a viewing screen, and I was off trying to squeeze myself into a game on the free foosball tables nearby. Within a few minutes a fellow American who was standing around alone and I were playing a couple of (probably) Turks. Twenty minutes or ...

... getting to the destination. When we got off the final train, we weren't sure which way the hotel was, so we decided to ask the locals. Matt saw some Asian girls, so told me to talk to them. They turned out to be Japanese and they gave me directions in Japanese. It was kind of nice to talk to ...