Some of my happiest experiences abroad have been walking around small cities or towns, admiring hidden gardens, or exploring narrow streets that sometime give on to beautiful vistas, or spotting little architectural details, like this glowing blue tile on a shopfront in ‘s-Hertogenbosch.
On my first excursion into the city of Potsdam, I decided to visit Sanssouci. The simplicity of this intention revealed the depth of my ignorance. I knew the name ‘Sans Souci’ (French for ‘carefree’, or as the Australians would say, ‘no worries mate’) as the title of the summer palace of Frederick the Great. I had a vague idea that the palace was in a large park and that the park contained other buildings and structures. But, I reasoned, how complicated could it be? No doubt I would arrive at the palace and then tourist friendly signposts would point me in the direction of anything else I was inclined to see.
As I have written at length about elsewhere, seeing is not believing when it comes to the so-called historic centre of Potsdam.
There is history in Potsdam beyond the ‘historic centre’ however. The area in which I am housesitting was once a large East German military and Stasi training area. The pretty red brick buildings opposite my apartment complex, were housing for Russian soldiers during the Cold War.
When I arrived in Potsdam, I took a tram from the train station through the centre of the city to the more suburban area where my housesit is located. I passed a huge pink rococo building which I had assumed was one of the palaces of Frederick the Great.
Twenty kilometres south of the important site of Uxmal, is a 2740 acre national preserve which contains the ruins of another Mayan site, Kabah.
On the Sunday before I left ‘s-Herogenbosch for Berlin, I decided to visit Utrecht. I wandered up to the station to start my trip about mid-morning, when I felt like it. I love how many trains there are in Europe going just about everywhere, just about all the time.
The train station in Utrecht is modern and enormous. I made my way through the big shopping mall attached to the station, reflecting on how much Dutch I have been able to figure out, just because it looks a lot like English sometimes.
I spent an extra ten days in Mexico after my housesit in Mexico City finished in order to explore some of the Mayan sites in the Yucatan. Although I wasn’t totally in love with Merida, it did provide a convenient base to accomplish my touring agenda.
For those readers unfamiliar with the Maya, a short introduction might be useful. I can, alas, provide only the most cursory of overviews. The Maya civilisation was vast in time, area, and complexity. A lifetime’s study would hardly encompass it all.
One of the nice features of hiring a personal guide to take me on a tour of Mayan sites, is that I also got to see some of the Mexican countryside. After my guide and I finished at Chichen Itza, we went on our way to Ek Balam. We passed a donkey tethered at the side of the road.
The day Karen and Simon left Mexico, we took a tour to Tula before delivering them to the airport.
There was a community here prior to the collapse of Teotihuacan. The earliest well-defined settlements in the Tula area appeared around 400 BC. Based on designs found on Tula pottery that seem to have come from Teotihuacan, the area may well have originally been under the control of that important city.
I accepted the housesit in Mexico City because I had always wanted to visit the National Museum of Anthropology and Teotihuacan. Secure in the opportunity to do those things, I started to look for other ‘can’t miss’ things to see and do in the area. As I said in an earlier post I was rather nervous about the city, but the more I read about the Distrito Federal, the more excited I became about the sheer depth of experience that was on offer.