Monday, June 4th (Berlin, Potsdam & Prague)

This morning Carla woke up sick with a head cold. Jobby did the nice husbandy thing and went out and got her lots of juice, tea, throat lozenges and a breakfast smoothie. Carla stayed in bed until 1pm while Jobby went out and explored.

On Carla’s recommendation I went to visit the checkpoint Charlie Museum which was a history of escape attempts from East Germany. We kind of forget that it was only in 1989 that the wall fell and people were able to freely travel between East and West Germany. The museum was pretty cool, very James Bond stuff with lots of tunnel digging, homemade aircraft building and even a few modified cars which raced across the border.

I then walked up to the Pergamon Museum on Museum Island where they have a lot of exhibits taken from Turkey (still a sore spot with the Turks). But it turns out most European museums are closed on Mondays so I went back to check on Carla and we decided to hit the road to Prague. We stopped in Potsdam outside Berlin and drove through Park Sanssouci (a royal palace and park commonly visited by Berliners). The museums were closed there too (so I didn’t get to see Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas), but we were able to grab lunch at Café College in a cute little cobblestone downtown.

We arrived in Prague and checked into our hotel in the heart of the tourist district. We were quite hungry so we just walked around the corner to Restaurant Celnice where I dug into a giant plate of pork chunks, dumplings and cabbage (one of my favorite meals from my last trip and much tastier than it sounds) while Carla stuck with the Chicken, Mash and Grilled Veggies (which amounted to a small pile of string sliced carrots). After that we went back, threw on the news and found out the President Bush had just arrived in Prague to sell the missile defense system to the Czech government and would be up at Prague Castle the next day.