ghost of nature.

the seddin lake. in the second week of my autumn vacation my parents and i had booked an airbnb apartment in potsdam , the capital of brandenburg state. the reason we wanted to visit this city was, of course, to see the many palaces & castles it has to offer, but also for nostalgic reasons ( especially for my mom ). she had been visiting potsdam in her teenage years and seemed to have quite fond memories of that visit, which for her is motivation enough to revisit places after you haven't been there for a very long time ( it is for me as well, it's nice to see if anything changed about a place or if it is exactly as you remember it ). the fact that my mom still possesses some pictures of that class trip decades ago, which i often admired going through my parent's photo albums, was what i needed to make me want to go there as well. so it was decided and it was a good decision indeed. it's a city that made me fall in love with it immediately, to be honest. ...

little pond on the grounds of belvedere castle. one of my absolute favourite places in thuringia is belvedere castle in weimar, a baroque beauty, famous for being one of the most important castles of the dukes of saxony-weimar. even goethe was a guest in this castle and worked on his natural scientific studies in its botanical gardens ( the hortus belverdereanus was very prominent in its heydays because of its huge diversity of plants & trees ).  the castle was built between 1728 and 1748 by johann adolph richter for duke ernest augustus I as a hunting lodge initially. over the years it developed into a cultural hub & pleasure house of the high society of weimar ( and probably germany at that time ), mainly due to the patron activities of duchess anna amalia . but other illustrious occupants inhabited this little castle as well, such as maria pavlovna & her husband charles frederick , who was responsible for the russian garden in the park of belvedere cast...