Schloss Sanssouci

Breakfast was actually at 8:30 this morning, and our numbers were even smaller yet this morning. It was actually just Hannah, Mira, Emerson, and I. There were still a few more people around, but they were all preoccupied with friends and family who had come to join them after the program was finished. After breakfast, I went back up to my room and got ready for the day and packed up my things to check out of the hostel. Once I was finished I walked into Hannah and Mira’s room and found both of them in their pajamas lying in their bed watching Netflix, not at all packed or ready. They both looked up at me with guilty faces and then we all burst out laughing at the whole scenario. I got my laptop and brought it into their room and waited while they did all the things I had already finished with and we went downstairs to check out of our rooms. Now, we were checking out of our rooms, but later in the day we checked back in to the hostel to the larger room I had reserved for the four of us for our last night. After turning in our keys, we locked our bags into the storage room at the hostel so that we could go out for the day without carrying them around. Today was the first day that we had to buy bus tickets that weren’t covered by the program, so we bought our tickets at the machine for the A, B, and C regions of Berlin. Our destination was Potsdam, where we were going to see the Sanssouci Castle. After a month in Germany we easily navigated the different trains and buses that we needed to take to get there. During our time in Germany we learned a lot, and not all of what we learned was strictly academic, but it is all definitely valuable.

We got to the Castle and the first thing we did was get lunch at the nearest food place. This has to be one of the first times in Germany that we were disappointed by our food. It was overpriced, very small portions (a sausage and fries and two leaves of lettuce) and it didn’t taste spectacular. Despite the poor judgement in food, we did get a kick out of watching the small birds wrestle over pieces of bread or French fries that other customers threw for them.

After lunch we made our way to the Castle itself. It’s not really the type of old medieval castle that I envision when I think of a castle, but it was by all means majestic in the ornamentation on the outside and the expanse of the building.

We didn’t really want to pay to go inside, so instead we walked around the Park Sanssouci. To start, the Castle is at the top of a hill that is ridged with terraces that are decorated with gates that frame well-kept trees, bushes, and flowers. At the bottom of the terraces there is a grand fountain with statues placed evenly around the perimeter of the circular path that encompasses it.

The path then diverged in three directions, and we decided to first travel to the right. At the end of the path we could see a building, but it was pretty far off so we made it our mission to make it to the other end to see what it was. Along the way we kept getting distracted by all of the other surrounding things in the park, such as a Chinese house that was decorated with gold statues and pillars,

and another palace like building called the Orangerieschlors. At the end of the road, when we finally made it, we saw the Neues Palace, which was also quite grand and abundantly decorated. We didn’t explore the area around the Neues Palace much because we wanted to get back to the Sanssouci Palace and see what was in the other directions. Going straight from the fountain we walked to Friedens Kirche (Church) which appeared to sit in the middle of a lake, which mirrored the image of the building into the water and made it appear quite majestic. The church had many well created statues, but was otherwise very simplistic in design. After a quick pass-through of the church we headed back towards the direction of the castle and found ourselves on the final path that we hadn’t traveled.

Having finished our tour of the marvelous Sanssouci Park, we trekked back up the terraces to see the front of the castle. At the front of the Castle there were pillars forming a semicircle as you might expect from Grecian ruins, and in the middle of the pillars there was an ornate gate that wasn’t open, but would open up to the view of another grand fountain and the scene of “ancient ruins” in the distance. We didn’t know it until we hiked the 15 minutes to these ruins, but all of the ‘ruins’ were artificially made for the King who once lived in Sanssouci Palace and wished to have them made. I kind of wish I hadn’t read the informational sign and instead lived in the ignorance of believing that they were actually ancient ruins. Knowing they were artificial kind of took some of the appeal of the structures, but at the same time they were still well crafted and older than most of the United States. Once we hiked back from the ruins, we took the buses and trains to get back to Berlin.

I decided to take a detour to Alexanderplatz because I wanted to get some very last minute souvenirs from the Berlin store in the shopping square. After my short detour I went back to the hostel and got dinner with Mira at a mediterranian diner and ordered the 3 euro Schwarma. It seemed fitting to us to eat cheap Schwarma for our last dinner in Berlin. It really encompassed the majority of our trip. Once we finished our Schwarma we went to the backerai that was two doors down from the hostel and got dessert to bring back to our room. The rest of the night consisted of figuring out the directions and times that we needed to get to the Berlin airport and from the airport in Pisa to Cinque Terre. We also managed to look up things to do and places to eat in each of the five towns once we got there. After we were finally satisfied with all that we had planned, we finally called it a night and went to sleep. I can’t speak for the others in my group, but I was quite anxious about the traveling we would be doing the next day, so I found it difficult to fall asleep, but eventually my exhaustion gave way to dreams of gelato and the Italian Riviera.