Berlin Germany – Day 4

March 14, 2014

We spent the day in Potsdam, just a bit southwest of Berlin.

Danielle dropped us off at one of the entrances to Sanssouci Park. Sanssouci Park is a large park surrounding Sanssouci Palace here in Potsdam.

Historic Mill of Sanssouci Park
While we waited for our tour to begin, I snapped this picture of the mill at the park. For a bit of history (and legend) on the mill, click the title of this section for what Wikipedia has to say.

Sanssouci is the former summer palace of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia. We walked the grounds of the park, then toured the interior of Sanssouci Palace. Here’s a few pictures we took on our way up to the palace.

Before our tour, we had lunch across the street from Sanssouci Palace at Moevenpick Restaurant. A bit pricey but a very nice meal. No food pictures but here’s a dessert we shared 🙂

While we couldn’t take any pictures inside the palace, I did take several outside.

After we were beat from walking and standing, we walked even further to a neat shopping area of Potsdam. The entrance to this area has yet another Brandenburg Gate (German: Brandenburger Tor)

And some pictures around the area. Gus F, if you read this blog, the first picture of for you 🙂

S-Bhan (train)
The Berlin S-Bahn is a rapid transit railway system in and around Berlin, the capital city of Germany. We’d decided we would take the S-Bahn home today. And we did just that. We walked maybe 1.5 km to get to the station we wanted in Potsdam. There was a nice mall in the train station. It’s there that I stopped at my first of 2 Vodafone stores (story below). Tiffani – our resident queen of public transport had told us to get on the S7 line and take it to S1 line and get off at the Zehlendorf. Once we figured out how to buy tickets – we did just that. We made it to our destination on the first attempt 🙂 Tiffani told us about the S-Bahn app too. I had already downloaded it at their home and fortunately, the app works great off-line. So I was able to see the entire route map and pretty much use the app in off-line mode. We’ll likely use the S-Bahn again tomorrow. Here’s the S-Bahn route we took home.

Mobile Internet
I decided to not use my iPhone 5 with Verizon service here in Germany but I did want some mobile data for maps and local apps and such. I tried Saturn and Vodafone stores to buy a SIM with prepaid data. Fail at the two Saturn’s as they do not have a SIM cutter and the iPhone 5 takes a nano-SIM. The first Vodafone store I tried, did their best but they could not activate a SIM for me. Unsure what the problem was. Here in Kleinmachnow where my cousin lives, right where we got off the S-Bahn, I found a tiny Vodafone store. The ladies there were able to fix me up. Now I have mobile data and some local calling and SMS. Should be good for the rest of our stay here.

Photo-processing Help
Tommy was my photo-tech tonight. Each day of vacation where I take pictures, I try to get them all downloaded into a daily folder on my laptop. On days where I shoot a lot of images, I like to break the process down by creating sub-folders by content or subject and move images into those folders. Then I go through all images in a folder to rotate them, resize them and eliminate many of them, leaving only the best. Tommy wanted to help so I showed him how to select and drag images and how to delete images. We had fun!

You sunk my battleship!
Tommy asked me if I knew how to play battleship. Of course I do! We played a quick round. He sunk much of my fleet but in the end, I bested him. I’ll give him a rematch later 🙂

Pizza
Sean picked up pizza for family dinner tonight. It was very enjoyable to sit around a large table with family and just chat. With such a large family here, there’s always much going on and much to chat about. We love it.