Here is a picture of me in front of a beautiful palace in San Soucci Park in Potsdam. There are a number of amaying “Schlössers” here all with their own unique style.

This is me on the stairs of yet another great building in San Soucci, I think a University owns this one…I have no idea who the person in the green is.

Good ole’ wind-crafts (windmills though they don’ mill anything)…quiet, clean and GIANT!

Tonight Dirk and I sat on the wall of this castle, looking over the beautiful town of Marburg. The buildings are so old, the history is in the air, and I want to kick everyone who calls this place home because I am so jealous (I’m pretty sure it is morally wrong to live in such a beautiful town)

Lesson learned today: I want to live in a place where the streets are so small that an SUV can’t drive anywhere.

I am very happy that my friend here speaks good english, but sometimes he gets sick of speaking in a foreign tongue (rightly so) so I just sit there quietly grinning as he has conversations that sound like “blooben gleeben showstuh foop.” It was really strange watching Austin Powers 3 dubbed in German last night while everyone around me spoke words I didn’t know.

In other news, I have seen things such as the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, along with some other famous things. We headed over to Potsdam yesterday to visit San Soucci, a really big palace, and a bunch of other mansions. It was very very beautiful! (pictures will come when i figure out how to get them on this darn PC.)

So finally, we are now in Guben where I met Dirk’s family. They don’t speak English, so everything I said went through translation by Dirk and his older sister who was there for the day. I found that video and photo’s do a lot better at communicating that words do.

Tomorrow I will make chocolate chip cookies (I brought the ingredients from America) and try to rent a German movie with English subtitles…All in all, everyone is very friendly and welcoming. Hoever, I am surprised that most people don’t really seem to care that I am from America. I thought that I would get the same reaction from people here that I give to foreigners in my friends houses. (lots of questions and try to speak their language) but I guess Americans are not that foreign of a thing here, they listen to our music, watch our movies, and have their own formed opinions of us. Either way, I did get a kick out of Dirk’s 7 year old brother and 10 year old sister looking at me and laughing as though I was some sort of animal in the zoo.

We will be in Guben one more night and then off to Marburg to meet with some of Dirk’s friends. I am having a very good time and slowly getting used to not understanding what anyone is saying. (my first German phrase that I learned was “I do not speak German, Sorry.”

Lesson to learn from this experience thus far: Learn some of the language before you go to a foreign country!

First Morning in Berlin
We woke up and had a slow morning. The English service at the church started around noon so we had plenty of time to eat breakfast and get ready. The shower in the parsonage was very tiny. In addition to being tiny, the floor was tilted and the showerhead was not affixed to the wall. I was a little bit worried that all showers for the rest of the month were going to involve me constantly slipping and washing separately from rinsing. The whole time getting ready, I looked wide-eyed at the European bathroom fixtures. That was probably the prominent way that I could tell I was in Europe.

Dirk and I went for a walk through the neighborhood before church started. The whole area had a feeling of familiarity. For some reason I had this thought that since I was in Germany, that everything was going to be different. But in actuality, the trees were the same. People looked the same. The houses looked a bit different, but nothing all that striking. Maybe it was just my state of mind, but even though things didn’t look all that different, they felt different. I was still on my “I’m actually in Germany” high.

I was excited that the church (International Baptist Church) offered a service in English. The people attending were a mixture of tourists, Americans working in Berlin, and people who just liked the language. The songs we sang were mostly new to me. Some were in English and some were in German. There were two pastors, one was African and one was American. The American Pastor preached a sermon about truth. He talked about how God is truth and God is in all things, therefore truth can be found in all things. It was a good sermon and it it was good to hear some English after a few days of hearing mainly German.

Off to Potsdam
After church, we made a quick trip to the ATM and to a nearby backpacking store to pick up some things for the rest of our trip. It was a pretty nice store. Dirk bought some hiking socks and a new thermarest sleeping pad. I bought a new backpacking stove, fuel and a sleeping pad for the trip. We were set for future backpacking adventures.
Dirk, being my personal tour guide, said that since we were close to Potsdam, we should go for a visit. Dirk said there was some sort of cool palace there, so I gladly accepted the idea and off we went.

It was drizzling slightly, but that didn’t stop people on the autobahn from driving quite fast. I was amazed at the condition of the highway. There were no billboards, everyone drove correctly, and there were no speed limits. I guess Germans are better drivers than Americans, after all you have to go through a lot more to get your license (including over 1,000 dollars just to get one). We arrived in Potsdam and followed the signs to Schloss Sanssouci.

Sanssouci
A rhino hung In the square near the parking garage. Of course it was a sculpture, not a real rhino, but it was quite life-like and strange nevertheless. We walked on through some gates and down a nice walkway through lines of trees. When we turned the corner, there it was: a magnificent view of the palace. It sat atop a series of terraced gardens. The palace and the gardens were built by Frederick the Great around 1750. Tourists milled around as the giant fountain sprayed high into the air. We walked up to the palace but found out that, like most things in life, you had to pay. It being only the beginning of the trip, and us being poor college students, we opted to just look through the windows and carry on. The palace was actually somewhat small compared to the impressiveness of the gardens. In the distance we saw a windmill and decided to walk to it. We walked through more archways, past a man playing a flute and up to the windmill. Again we had to pay to go up in it, so we went on our way.

I hadn’t realized that Sanssouci was more than just a palace and gardens. It was a giant plantation with numerous palaces and buildings on the grounds. We walked past more fountains and took some great photos from the top of the orangerie. We decided to actually pay the few euros to walk inside one of the palaces (We made sure that it was one of the more impressive ones). We had to put on these big felt slippers so our shoes didn’t mess up the uber-fancy floors. I couldn’t believe the ornate furniture, the stone sculptures and the beautiful paintings that adorned each room. I can’t imagine that people actually felt comfortable hanging out in places like that. Everything was built to impress not to be comfortable. We kept walking the grounds through gardens, and past more impressive buildings. After a few hours of doing that, we had our fill of fanciness and decided to head back.

The weather continued to be a mix of sun and clouds. We encountered two interesting things on our walk out of the grounds. The first was what appeared to be little wood figures standing under a tree. They looked similar to garden gnomes from far away but upon closer inspection I discovered that they were coming from the tree itself. It looked like the roots were coming up through the ground but had been routinely cut off at a certain height. I had never seen anything like it before. The second thing was an older German man. He was nothing special, but it was what he did that was so special. As he walked passed us he asked me a question in German. Now you might be saying “so what, you are in Germany, of course they are going to talk in german.” But to me it was an honor. To me, it meant that I looked like a local. I looked European, not an obnoxious American tourist.

A Night in Berlin
We headed back to Berlin and met up with Bise and Robert. They were going to a friends house and we tagged along. We stopped for my second Doner of the trip (oh so delicious). The guy’s friend’s apartment was actually pretty cool. It had a few bedrooms and the kitchen/living room had very high ceilings. We sat around, drinking beer and chatting (mostly them in German). Then the movie came on: Austin Powers 3, Goldmember. It was on television with only a few commercial breaks. The strangest thing was seeing an American movie dubbed into German. The Character Frau was no longer the only German character (but the guys said that she had a different German accent then the rest of the characters). After the movie we headed back to the Parsonage, drank some beer, prayed and turned in for the night.

Video from this day posted at Stone Farm:

Google Earth Placemarks for Day 2: Open this map