To get some exercise, see some sites, get me educated and smell some flowers, I signed up for a Fat Tire Bike Tour to Potsdam. The Nazi Third Reich tour looked a little menacing and Nazi architecture seemed to be very severe in an already very orderly Germany and therefore unappealing to me at the time. Every city has its landmark which is always a over hyped and overrated. I wanted to avoid the Berlin Wall like the plague, so the Berlin Wall tour was out. I also don't like glazing over stuff in a general fashion, so the All-In-One city bike tour was also out. The Potsdam bike tour was the longest and most luxurious looking. It also didn't have the hazards of tram tracks and pedestrians. I hate city bike riding. GREAT! That took care of that.
On hindsight, I probably should have done all those tours because the guides are endlessly entertaining and endearing. The above is a picture of the first thing our guide, Charles, drew for us once we arrived in Potsdam. He said that the all the Prussian rulers had very boring names. They were named either Friedrich, Wilhem or Friedrich Wilhem. You can remember them by their hairdos, hats or facial hair. It was actually the second Friedrich Wilhem that was called Friedrich Wilhem the First, so our guide told us that the real first Friedrich Wilhem was really Friedrich Wilhem to the power of zero.
To get to Potsdam, we had to haul the bicycles up the escalator to the train station at Alexanderplatz. You have to push the first wheel onto the escalator and squeeze the brakes. DO NOT LET GO OF THE BRAKES WHEN YOU ARE ON THE ESCALATOR, OTHERWISE BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN.
A newly made friend of a friend, Suzann (friend of Sofia), offered to let me stay at her place in between Prenzlauer Berg and Pankow because her roommate was leaving for the weekend. It worked out spectacularly, because this was also the day I was scheduled to move into an 8 person dorm (barf) in the hostel. She also insisted that I have a proper night out in Berlin. This means that we spent the entire night and early morning not sleeping. The middle stamp was at an old East Berlin style club that played appropriately themed 70's style funk. All the furnishings were straight out of the 70's and the warm yellow glow from the round lighting fixtures and smokey room put me into a daze. There were silent movies playing on the walls. It was all very strange. Anyway, I went on this bike tour on a three hour nap. I scrambled to get to Alexanderplatz.
As we were waiting on the platform for the train, a guy from Sao Paolo immediately took off down the escalator, in search of some snacks to eat. I wanted to do the same because I hadn't had any coffee. No coffee + no sleep + bicycle + me = very dangerous. The Frenchman called after me "CAN YOU GET ONE FOR ME TOO!" I raced down and raced back up because the line was too long. Definitely NOT pleased. Even grouchier than before. As we waited 2 minutes for the train to pull in, the French dude goes "You could've gotten me a coffee by now." RAGGGGGWWWHHH. STOP IT.
The amazing thing is, there was a vending machine on the train, a train similar to the Metro North or Long Island Rail Road and it cost 1 euro, and was better than any American dishwater diner coffee. Fantastic! We sipped coffee much to my relief and the Parisian's disgust, and both our caffeine headaches went away. I was riding the bicycle and taking pictures and talking to people and I thought hey, this is great, my bike riding skillz are pretty good, even though it was affecting the quality of my photographs. Then I tried to run up on the sidewalk and promptly fell off the bike and was quite confused.
At the beer garden we stopped at for lunch, my scrapes began to bleed and Charles the Guide handed me a bunch of alcohol swabs and band aids as we talked about living in DC (he'd lived there for 7 years). I also made friends with Adam, the other lone young traveler, an Australian software engineer from Brisbane, who managed to get a month off work to go traveling and was leaving the next day for Vienna, then Paris, then Monaco, then I don't remember. I had 2 bratwursts and fries and apfel shorle. He had the same and a liter of beer. He finished ALL of it. He also fell off his bike at the end of the tour.
We stopped by Sanssoucci (Without Worry), summer palace of great Prussian ruler Friedrich the Great. He said that when he died, he wanted to be buried there because it was so beautiful, it was the only place where you could be sans soucci. Eventually, 60 years after his death, his body was exhumed and brought up to where it lies now. He hated his wife, so he was buried next to his dogs. People leave potatoes on his grave because he was responsible for introducing potatoes as a staple crop in Germany.
Later, at Cecilienhof, where the Potsdam Conference was held, I cut my my hand on the bicycle lock and Charles the Guide said that he had approximately enough band-aids to hang out with me for another two hours. SIGH! So also at the Cecilienhof, the French guy got some ice cream that was mediocre. Or mediocre by French standards. But I guess mediocre nevertheless. So after we returned the bicycles, I really needed a real coffee, so I asked if Adam the Traveling Australian if he wanted to chill out at Kauf Dich Glücklich (Shop Yourself Happy), which is now a cafe that sells cheap homemade ice cream (0.70 euros) and cheap but good espresso drinks (1.50 euros). Bonus points playing Ellen Allien and Apparat!
It's verrry cute. I had 2 scoops of ice cream, guava and chocolate, had way too much coffee and talked about spontaneous travel and being very accident prone.
And when he realised that he was talking to an official glutton, asked where he could go for a fun festive dinner with some people he'd met at his hostel, Circus, the one that I wanted to stay in but were fully booked. I sent him in the direction of White Trash Fast Food. I don't have pictures of that, but it's a bit of a bizarre place. It used to be a Chinese restaurant, now taken over by hipsters and they left all the tacky Chinese decorations in place and added their own bizarre collection of decorations. They're known for their rude menu and burgers. They also were playing some REALLY BIZARRE Nazi porn on the TVs when I was there. It's something so bizarre I'm not sure how to express how bizarre it was in words. Most bizarre.
Anyway, extremely fun times! And would only be made more fun if I knew how to work a turntable so we could check out some German techno at the record shops, but alas I could not! And I also had to hurry back to make Suzann some pork chop for dinner.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment