The Botanical Garden
Berlin's Bontanical Garden is pretty incredible, like other botanical gardens in Germany we've seen. These shots are inside an absolutely vast greenhouse that was perhaps three stories high. It was stiflingly hot in there.
Of course, these lily pads loved it. They are as big as maybe five feet across and as tough as leather. You could float away on of these things.
One really nifty thing in the greenhouse was this artificial grotto and mountain. Here's the stairs going up and then Heather looking down from above.
Potsdam
Charlottenburg is just a little cottage and yard compared to Potsdam, which was Fredrich the Great's palace about an hour by train outside of Berlin. All of these pictures are from the Park Sanssouci, where the palace itself stands.
We took some pictures of ourselves while we ate lunch on the stairs of some huge lesser building in the park.
The view from where we were sitting and eating.
There was a neat school of strong-looking koi swimming in a fountain at the bottom of the steps of the Orangerie. They looked like they could skeletonize a man in just seconds if he fell in.
The fountain itself, and the tiered ivy gardens leading up to the Orangerie. Each of those tiers is maybe ten feet tall, so the building in the distance is quite far from this fountain. It's a big place.
The young Hercules struggles mightly with a snake. Or else constipation.
Yep, that's a palace all right. We didn't go in—it's exhausting walking through the park to get to the building itself and the place is enormous.
One statue had been cleaned, the others showed the years and years of industrial grime that's all over old buildings in Berlin.
