One of the many lakes in Sanssouci Park

One of the day trips you can do from Berlin is to a place called Potsdam, or ‘City of Palaces’. NewEurope offer tours there that go for a few hours, but ive had mixed experiences of the day trip style tours that they offer. So I decided to just do it myself. Germany being Germany, its extremely straight forward and easy to get there, and quite cheap. One of the S-Bahn lines goes straight to Potsdam HBF in about 45 minutes, and from there you catch a local bus to Sanssouci Park where Palaces and gardens are. Unlike most bus services in the world, the ones in Germany for the most part have electronic displays of the upcoming stops, so you know when to get off. Its a far cry from places such as Italy where there would be no signage and the connections of public transport would be shocking or non-existent.

The weather hasn’t been the best lately, so the fact that it at least wasn’t raining was enough of a reason to pick that day to go. It was still bitterly cold walking around though. It was a Monday when I went so all the palaces were actually closed, but ive been inside enough palaces lately that I wouldn’t have gone in to them anyway. They all cost to go inside too. The entire place is pretty awesome, however its rather baron at this time of the year. All of the trees don’t have leaves and all the flower beds have been ripped out for winter. Its quite strange as well because all of the statues have been covered in big wooden boxes. And this place has a LOT of statues, hundreds of them. So there is just rows and rows of grey wooden boxes everywhere. The fountains have all been drained too. Im still glad I went and saw the place, but it would look stunning in summer.

One thing that was a little weird is when I was walking around on the other side of one of the lakes there was a dude sitting on the edge in just his underwear, and a chick taking photos of him. Thats pretty weird on its own, but you gotta remember that its like 5 degrees. Then about 20 mins later in the same area I walk around a corner and he’s sitting there on a wall, completely starkers this time. He gets a shock when he sees me and quickly jumps up and puts his pants on. Being in to photography I realise that these nude art photoshoots happen in places like this, but this was different because the chick taking the photos just had a crappy point and shoot camera, so no idea what the photos were for. Soooo yea that was all interesting.