Berlin Part III

More on our Berlin adventures…

We took a day trip out to Potsdam, a little town about 30 minutes from Berlin, and we saw the beautiful gardens of the Sansoucci Park. This park is huge and it has at least 3 palaces and lots of other beautiful buildings and fountains and statues and thing.

Lindsey really wanted to go to the opera and I thought it sounded fun, so we found some tickets to see Tristan and Isolde, a German opera by Wagner. Very famous. Our seats were on the very last row, but that was not going to deter us. We brought snacks (just in case) and we were chatting with the very nice German couple next to us, when we glanced at the program. It was a five-hour-long opera! We thought it had to be a typo, but the couple next to us said, “It’s only 5 hours? Oh that’s short for Wagner.” Yikes. So it begins. Singing in German, subtitled in German, and practically no action, so I had no idea what was happening. I didn’t even know the basic plot so I was totally lost and the singers were giving me no clue. I fell asleep for about 40 minutes and I woke up at the first (yes, first) intermission. The couple next to us says they are bored and they’re leaving to go see a movie. We decide this is torture so we leave too. So we got some pretzels and chocolate and went back to the hostel.

We went to church on Easter at the International Baptist Church that some friends of Lindsey had told us about and that was great. The kids had a little Easter presentation and we got some chocolate for being first time visitors. German church is great! At the end of the service, one of the members of the congregation, a German man, got up to share a special song on Easter. He was an opera singer and he sang the most beautiful song, O Divine Redeemer. It was amazing. I told Lindsey that this 5 minutes of opera was better than the hour and a half of the other that I slept through. It was beautiful.

Some other random things we saw/did in Berlin:

• We saw a guy in an Easter Bunny suit at the train station in Potsdam so I took my picture with him and he gave us chocolate bunnies. I’m glad I was in Germany for Easter because they celebrate it a lot like we do in the States, with bunnies and eggs and chocolate.
• We had lots of good food while we were there because one of the best parts of traveling is the eating! Besides our delicious hamburgers at Andy’s Diner, we also had some excellent German food, currywurst, burritos and some kebabs. Lindsey had her first kebab experience and she’s a fan! We also enjoyed our fair share of pretzels, German baked goods and of course, chocolate.
• We went to a couple of really interesting museums. We went to the Jewish Museum which is the most visited museum in Berlin and had a ton of information. You could spend a year in there. We also went to the Pergamon Museum and there they had these huge displays of whole Roman altars rebuilt 2 stories high and part of the ancient gate of Babylon. It was pretty impressive and very cool to walk around these exhibits that were life size.

I really enjoyed my time in Berlin and I would recommend visiting it to anyone. I never really thought that Berlin was high on my list of places to see, but it is such an interesting city with so much history and character that it is not to be missed. You can definitely see the difference still between east and west Berlin and it is a constantly changing city. I think if I go back there in five or ten years, it will be a different city.