Bike Tour of Potsdam

This past Saturday, I went to Potsdam with our field trip course, "Berlin vor Ort." Potsdam a city to the southwest of Berlin, a few stops on the S-Bahn outside of the city. It was the residence of former Prussian kings and the location of the Potsdam Conference, which I will talk about further down. We rented bikes next to the station, and 30 Stanford students proceeded to ride all over the city, dominating the streets and annoying locals. Here is a 6 minute photo walk through or our 6 hour bike tour. One observation: taking good pictures is pretty hard when you are in a pack of 30 bikes.

The city has a series of interconnecting lakes, and we saw our first one not long after we started riding. The city is really scenic, has a lot of green, and was basically just really beautiful. The professor led the way, and the rest of us followed. He said we should be okay, but some people got lost last year--which he said was mind-boggling.

We saw a lot of really nice houses, but I could not hear our professor as he was too far away. Maybe this house had some significance, maybe it was just cool. Either way, I appreciate it.

This next picture gives you a glimpse of what the cars had to go through to navigate around us. I thought the old school Chevy was a particularly interesting sight. Also, most of the streets were covered in cobblestone, which was quite painful in combination with shockless bikes.

I don't quite remember what this was and will ask my professor.

Schloss Cecilienhof is the English tudor style summer residence of the Hohenzollern family. More importantly, this is where the 1945 Potsdam Conference took place, where Churchill, Truman, and Stalin met to deal with the problems at the end of WWII.

I remember this by Spy Bridge, but it's actually called the Glienicke Bridge. The United States and Soviet Union exchanged captured spies on this bridge during WWII.

We stopped at a Biergarten for a late lunch. The professor was slightly baffled by the fact that no one ordered beer, which he says is the best part of the place. I personally think it's a good idea to bike sober.

As we were eating, a shark boat passed the Biergarten. Before this, my friend Kristine pointed out that there were many interesting looking boats on the lake. This one takes the cake though.

After the break at the Biergarten, we biked over to Park Sanssouci, the summer palace of Frederick the Great. My guidebook claims that it is "among the most beautiful palace complexes in Europe," and I don't doubt it. The name "Sansscouci" means "without cares," and one of the interesting interpretations of this name comes from the fact that Frederick the Great was buried here--we are without cares in death. Morbid.

The park had many beautiful sculptures of Greek mythological gods. Here's Artemis.

The Neues Palais in the background can be seen from the main avenue in the park.

After our brief visit at Park Sanssouci, we walked over to Friedenskirche, the Church of Peace. We were in the right place at the right time, so the professor decided that Stanford should pay for tickets to the Peace on Earth choir concert. The music was good, but it was slow and we were tired. I'm pretty sure each of us fell asleep at one point or another, which was especially bad because we were something like a third of the whole audience.

I took this next picture while riding over a bridge on the way home. Its serene calmness is actually pretty deceptive of the actual circumstances. An hour and 15 minutes into the concert, our professor rushed to get us out of the church. Some of us thought he was angry that we fell asleep, but it turned out that we needed to return the bikes by 7pm. It was 6:35 when we left the church. What ensued was pure hilarity as a long parade of Stanford students mad-rushed down the streets of Potsdam, dodging cars and riding down the wrong side of street at times. Because some people were trailing pretty far behind, our professor stayed behind and let the students find their way. At one point, we were off road and in the midst of a forest. I think we fully understood how some people could have gotten lost last year. I am honestly surprised that no one was lost or hurt. Ultimately, everything turned out fine, and we found our way back 20 minutes past 7.