Travelling Hopefully

What happens when a city is remarkably short on pigeons?  Well in Berlin the niche is filled by sparrows.  These little lumps of brown are everywhere.  Should one even think about food one is swamped by a horde of sparrows.  It looks like a remake of The Birds for midgets.  By sad comparison it has to be reported that Berlin has the most wretched, scraggy looking magpies I have ever seen in my life.  I suspect that the sparrows are beating them up.  Every magpie I have seen so far looks like it has been dragged through a drainpipe backwards.

But enough of things corvid.  Its time to get on to things Prussian.  I wandered past the victory column in Berlin which celebrates (with hindsight, prematurely) Prussia's victory in various wars.  The string of victories ended abruptly towards the end of the nineteenth century.  Midway through the twentieth century Prussia ended abruptly as well.  I trotted down to Potsdam to see Sans Souci the summer palace of Frederick the Great.  For those who don't know Frederick was the guy who really put Prussia on the map (Stalin was the guy who took it off again).  When Frederick came to the throne Prussia was a modestly sized German kingdom of no great account.  With a combination of military skill, organisational talent, breathtaking moral bankruptcy and sheer blind luck Frederick transformed his nation into the leading kingdom in Germany and a serious player in the global power politics of the day.  In his down time he played the flute, hobnobbed with literary arse kissers like Voltaire and built Sans Souci.

It took me half an hour to go through the palace but over three hours to find it.  Getting the train to Potsdam was the easy part.  Once there I stepped off the platform and strode confidently in the wrong direction.  After a while the distinct lack of palaces clued me in to my mistake and I retraced my steps and tried again.  Eventually I reached the park which contained the palace.  A sign at the entrance said "Beware of the caterpillars" (I am not joking) but I laugh in the face of danger so I went in anyway.

The gardens are absolutely huge and have the usual trees, grass and bits of pseudo classical statuary that monarchy seem to insist on decorating their lawns with.  After much wandering I spied a large and impressive building in the distance.  Exhausted and desperate I stumbled towards it.  On arrival the man at the information desk informed me, rather condescendingly in my view, that I had arrived at the New Palace which Frederick had built for his guests and that Sans Souci was at the other end of the path about two kilometres away.  Have I mentioned it was pissing down rain all this time?

Two soggy kilometres later I arrived at Sans Souci at 1pm (having left the flat before 10) to be informed that the next tour was at 2.15.  I almost went home but decided to have lunch instead.  Through sheer coincidence I had approached Sans Souci the right way.  There is a road which will take you right up to the palace but the best way to approach is through the gardens so that you come across the vine laden tiers that form a series of terraces leading up to the palace at the top.  It's also probably better if the wind isn't blowing the rain into your eyes.

Sans Souci is actually quite small as palaces go.  There are only about eighteen rooms (excluding servants quarters and other trifles of that nature) and none of them are terribly large.  This was Frederick's palace away from palace in the Summer months and despite somewhat overheated comments by the guides probably was never meant to be Prussia's answer to Versailles or Schonbrunn.  Sans Souci doesn't look like it was built by a narcissistic megalomaniac and it doesn't even have the sheer mass of Buckingham Palace (which, if the queen didn't live there would probably be demolished for crimes against architecture).  It is light, elegant and beautiful if slightly over rococoed.  The palace is supposed to be one of the greatest examples of the rococo style in Germany.  I'm not sure what rococo is (I suspect it might be an icecream flavour) but apparently it involves a lot of tendrils of gold crawling everywhere on a light background.  It makes the building look like its veins are exposed.  Sans Souci was a lovely little palace but if I were him I would have built it a little further away from the carpark.

On my overcrowded train on the way back the woman behind me announced in three languages that she was about to vomit which added a pleasing layer of suspense to the journey.  Fortunately I changed trains before she made good on her threat.