Excellent Adventure 2018 Day 10 - Return to Civilization or Onward To Berlin

After our last breakfast on board ship (I will miss the Maitre 'd and the servers hovering like hummingbirds), onto the bus we went. Today's tour guide was Haika (no idea how to spell that). Even more confusing, the male bus driver's name was Helga. Which previously I've associated with women. What do I know.

It was a 90 minute drive to Potsdam. Since I had snagged the very first row seats, Haika took to talking to me directly for the entire time, making it extremely difficult to fall asleep. Her English was colloquial, which was great. I think I've reached information overload -  not much of what she said actually sank in.

The most fun part of the drive was the drive on an autobahn. Not that our bus went particularly fast - the bus' engine is engineered to go no faster than 100 km/hr (about 65 mph). This is how the speed limit thing works:

• If the speed limit sign was blue - that speed limit was a "recommendation" (typically ignored).
• If the speed limit sign was red - then that is the enforced speed limit that people actually stick to (penalties are pretty high).

So there might be stretches of the highway with a red speed limit (it dropped to 60 km/hour at one point), interspersed with blue speed limits. Amazingly enough, immediately after a blue speed limit sign pops up, all the cars jump into hyper drive leaving buses and trucks in the dust. It was fun to watch.

We first drove through Sanssouci, a community of castles of sorts. There are 6 rather impressive looking castles in Sanssouci, but we didn't stop at any of them - yet.

We continued on through Sanssouci and arrived at Potsdam. Whereupon communication broke down a little bit. What we heard: "Meet at 12:30. There's cafes over there and a bathroom over here". Somehow we sort of assumed there would be some touring first?

What we should have heard: "We are not touring anything here. You have free time till 12:30. Go get lunch and come back here".

I came out of the bathroom to find everybody but Andy and our cruise friend, Ken (the New Yorker). Everybody else was gone.

We wandered around for a bit until we found an open cafe with tables in the shade. We had an entertaining time figuring out the menu. The waitress was very accommodating. I had a brie and tomato sandwich - it was great!

Here's a few photos from Potsdam:

By now the day had gotten quite hot. Back on the hot bus we went, and we turned back to Sanssouci.

We switched guides at this point, to a British woman who was our local guide for the castle itself. We did our best to hide in the shade.

Here is a photo of the outside of the castle:

And these are the gardens in front of the castle:

We then proceeded to enter the castle for the tour of the inside. Keep in mind - it was now full afternoon sun and G0d awful hot outside. We were entering a building with zero air conditioning or air circulation of any kind. Good times.

Some time in the last week I had bought a paper fan at a museum. Between that and my dorky walking stick/seat, I was able to finish the tour. About half way through, a bunch of people had to leave because it was just too hot. Even the tour guide admitted that recently she had almost fainted. Ok, then! 

Considering all that, I actually have no idea what the guide said about any of the rooms. Some of them were sitting rooms, some bedrooms, some music rooms - it was all very much Versailles-like.

Here are some photos of the interior rooms. I have no idea what their functions were. 

To liven things up, we discovered this rather alarming bust of a black person - it really couldn't be scarier or more racist if it tried:

At the very end of the tour, there was this one interesting painting - an Andy Warhol version of the original portrait of Friedrich the Great (he sorta resembles George Washington, I think anyway):

Freidreich the Great, Andy Warhol version

Even though it was still incredibly hot outside, in the shade it was much more comfortable than in the castle. I might suggest to Viking that perhaps the castle tour should be in the morning when it's cooler.

Time to get back on the bus and on our way to Berlin at last.

The first landmark was the Bridge of Spies:

Just a hint of the fascinating history to visit in the next few days.

Our arrival at the Berlin Hilton went as smoothly as Benne could make it. We have two more tours tomorrow with Viking and then we are back to being officially on our own for the last couple of days.

We had dinner in the hotel, after which we asked some questions of the concierge, followed by locating a chocolate shop and a segway tour company.

Tomorrow: Panoramic Tour of Berlin