Day three of the Berlin trip took us out to Potsdam, site of the Potsdam conference where England, the US and the USSR hammered out what would turn into East and West Germany. Potsdam was very much part of East Germany after the war, hence when we arrived, multiple bookstores still offered Knigi (books in Russian). Although the town is extremely quaint, with pretty churches and an entire neighborhood built in imitation of Dutch architecture (see the Berlin 3 pictures page), there were still plenty of Eastern Bloc architectural horrors, especially on the outskirts. Such as this pretty building:

Undaunted, we motivated the children by promising them noses crêpes. And so this is the story of how I left France to go eat crêpes in Potsdam, Germany. We ended up sitting outside on Lindenstraße eating crêpes in blinding white sunshine and broiling in the heat. Altogether, it was not how I had imagined my trip to Germany. It was great, but not how I had imagined Germany (don’t worry—later in the day we shivered in a windy and shadowed Biergarten, which was much closer to my idea of what Germany would be like).  Biergarten. Beer Garden. Who was the genius who first had the idea of putting those two words together?

When the children were not eating crêpes, they were admiring the walls of noses inside the crêperie. This is just one of those things that happens when you go to small town—they turn out to have hundreds of plaster casts of noses. You never learn why—they’re just there. I think it’s better not to know. And should you ever be in Potsdam, I recommend going to see the noses. This is the only collection of plaster (or terra cotta?) noses I have ever had to fortune to admire.

    

Then we were off the lovely Sanssouci Park, home of Ceclienhof, the palace where the Potsdam conference was actually held.

On entering the grounds, one admires the giant Soviet star of flowers planted just inside as a recognition that the conference was taking place in Stalin’s part of Germany, and it’s been maintained ever since. There’s a plaque telling the story of the star, and they explain it at length again in the audio guides that accompany the tour of the palace. An American couple examined the sign, did the whole audio tour along with us and afterward asked me to take a picture of them in front of the star. “There you go, the two of you in front of the Soviet star,” I said, handing back their camera. “Oh, no,” said the woman patiently, “that’s not a Soviet star.” Proving that no experience can break through Americans’ total, total immunity to all forms of history. And knowledge.

No photography allowed inside, I’m afraid, but if you head over to the pictures page you’ll find after-tour pics of the lake, kids eating ice cream, and the Biergarten, where Michael and I inadvisably ordered the 500 cl beers, which we could not finish (I can drink a beer that size, just not when it’s cold and windy). From there we wandered back along the lake until we reached the Glienecke Bridge, famed site of spy exchanges during the Cold War. That was pretty cool, since it’s a very deeply ingrained image of the tension of the times. Of course, while there were real spy exchanges, the reason the bridge became so memorable is because of the countless film versions. It looks rather prettier today.

 

We had great success in threatening to exchange Sasha for a captured Western spy. “I’m not a spy!” he growled fiercely. “Oh, yeah?” we countered. “You speak Russian, don’t you?” He looked slightly concerned. “You have a Russian passport, don’t you?” we continued. “And where are you going after this?” Silence. “Hmmm?” “Russia,” he meekly admitted. “But I’m not a spy!”

All we had left was to take a group portrait. We eventually realized, like Bilbo tossing dwarfs down the hole, that it’s all very well to take group portraits—except you can’t include the photographer.

That’s what you think!

The shadows were tricky, but manageable. But the two photos were taken at different angles and at different distances. Which means that if you look hard at my right foot, it appears to floating about a centimeter off the ground.