Potsdam (Germany): a Day Trip

May 2025

I haven’t posted for almost two years now, mainly because managing the photos had become so onerous. The more we traveled, the more photos I had to look through, and I felt I had become a slave to my pictures. Then, just the other day, I began to wonder what I was going to do with all the photos? So, I decided to resume the blog, but, to ease my way back in, I am starting with a short post on the last place we visited at the end of our 6 week trip in April – May.

As a child, I never knew where Potsdam (population: 183,000) was, but I knew of the Potsdam Declaration. Yes, that’s the document signed by Truman, Churchill & Chiang Kai-shek spelling out the terms of surrender for Japan at the end of WW2. Through the terms of the agreement, Korea earned its independence from Japan. When we first began to visit Berlin, I noticed that Potsdam was almost a southwestern suburb of Berlin. Potsdam figures hugely in the history of Prussia and Germany, and the remnants of its old glory has been honored by UNESCO as a World Heritage site.

We took the S7 train (Euro 3.80) from the Zoological Garden station in Berlin and arrived at the terminal station of Potsdam in under 30 minutes.

Everyone seemed to be heading in the same direction from the station so we followed the crowd. In a few minutes, we crossed a bridge and, while some people continued on the big road, we turned right along the river and came to this area in the picture above.

This is the old town center that has a palace, museums, the old city hall, St. Nicolas Church, and the old market square.

We kept walking through a park and reached the Catholic church of Sts. Peter and Paul. This is the Dutch Quarter, the area of the old Dutch settlement, where the skilled artisans from the Netherlands came to live.

The main pedestrian street of the city, Brandenburger Street, starts from this church. At this point, it was barely 11 AM and most restaurants were not yet open.

We were in Potsdam on Ascension Thursday, a holiday in Germany, so most stores, including, sadly, this one, were closed.

We were hungry and managed to find an open restaurant, a pan Asian restaurant that had sushi, dumplings etc. We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of food and service. The price was also reasonable.

Brandenburger street ends at the Brandenburg Gate. This is much smaller than the one in Berlin, but it looked about right for the spot.

The Protestant Church of Peace stands right outside one of the entrances to Sanssouci Park. It is peaceful inside and outside the church which was modeled after medieval Italian monasteries.

Frederick the Great named his summer palace Sans Souci,which is French for without care. Obviously he intended it as a place to chill.

.Most visitors to Potsdam end up in Sanssouci Park to see the Terraced Gardens and the Palace.. There’s no way I could take a photo of the compound to show the size of the terraces with my humble phone.

By the time we had finished walking around the Palace area, we were tired. Sanssoucci Park is huge! Luckily(?), Orangery Palace, a must see and at least a half a mile away, was closed for renovations, we decided we’d seen enough & headed back.

This time we took the big road from the Brandenburg Gate back to the station. There were some interesting buildings to look at along the way, as well as the Potsdam sign in the first photo in this post and the Film museum.