Tax free travel pt. 1

Catching up...
I spent the second week of September in Berlin with a brief visit to Stockholm. Although I do consider it a vacation, the main purpose was to present a paper at the European Consortium of Political Research. Rather than taking normal postcard-like pictures, I decided to include myself in all of them.

Here is the Berlin/Potsdam portion of the trip.

I arrived without much sleep and immediately set out for Alexanderplatz. This is the cold-war era TV tower that East Berlin erected so that west Berlin could see how cool they were.

This was a sweet little square with a vanquishing King statue (Frederick I think?). In any case, anytime you can take a picture of a horse butt with a cathedral in the background, you should.

I honestly don't remember what this is, but there is a funny story. I was walking around taking pictures of myself with these buildings and a couple of German guys were eating at a cafe. I started to take this picture and they laughed at me. I smiled really big, shrugged my shoulders, and took a couple more.

This is the longest intact portion of the old Berlin Wall. It is now a very large canvas for some well known artists. If you are in Berlin, a visit to the wall is a must, right?

I tried to walk a significant amount of the Wall's old course. Berlin has tried to remember where it went as well. Throughout the city, they have laid a cobblestone path (two cobbles wide) to mark the path. In the decades after the wall, many buildings have dissected the markers, so that the cobbles run straight into buildings now.

And of course, there is the Brandenburg gate. What I didn't know was that this was the historical gate to the City of Berlin. At the opposite end of a giant park is the Charlottenburg gate, the official gate to the city of Charlottenburg, where Fredrick the Great had his palace. Just to the right of this picture and through the gate is the American embassy (I always want to know where they are when I travel).

I had never been in the Reichstag building (German Parliament), so I took the tour of the dome. It is an amazing structure, completely covered in glass, with a set of mirrors that direct sunlight into the plenary chamber when they have their meetings. It is also a good spot for a visual tour of the city.

Back along the wall trail, I stopped to take the requisite car pictures. (I think that everyone needs to recognize the differences in automotive culture wherever anyone travels. Only in Europe would you find a Maserati Quattroporte (~$120k) parked bumper to bumper with the cheapest, multi-color, people's car, a VW Lupo (~$10k).

And then the requisite "I wish that they had this one in the USA" car, the BMW 118d. It looks kind of like a dog's face, but it gets great mileage (diesel), is a small, sporty luxury car, and it's a hatchback with lots of space.

A more insightful trip happened late one night on a walk. I ran across the major BMW dealer for Berlin (near the Charlottenberg Gate). I couldn't resist a picture, but then I became more intrigued and started looking at prices. The numbers were the same if not higher than the USA prices, but they were in euros. That day, each euro cost $1.39. There, cars simply aren't accessible to everyone like they are here.
The conference was held in Potsdam, the summer residence of Fredrick the Great. He built a ginormous summer palace there (Sanssouci Palace), complete with an Orangerie (place to preserve botanical species), art gallery, windmill
fake ruins to cover the reservoir that feeds the fountains,
oh, and when the summer palace gets too small, a much larger summer residence,

Back in Berlin, his normal palace was nothing to sneeze at.

A little German Versailles.

The gardens were beautiful. People from Berlin were jogging about the grounds, but I stopped to look at the flowers. Look closely, the flower has multiple levels, but believe me, it is one flower.

Each day of the conference, I would take the U-bahn (U7 from Wilmersdorfer Strasse) to Yorck Strasse and change to the S-Bahn (S1 to Griebnitsee). There is the best Donner/Kebab shop at the S-bahn station. One day while eating a Kebab, I saw these campaign posters. The bottom one is typical of most German election posters, the candidate's picture and party name (this one happens to be for the green party). The top one, was by far my favorite.
Who wouldn't vote for the pirate party?