As in I packed up all of my possessions, transported them to a different apartment building, then unpacked them there. I also gave back some old keys and got some new ones.Now, as much fun as it is to uproot your life and physically carry everything you own to a strange new place, I did not just do this for kicks and giggles. Especially astute readers may have noticed that I mentioned my previous hostess, 27-year-old student Katja, exactly one time on this blog. That’s because she was an awful roommate and a massive source of stress, and I didn’t want to (A) focus on my crappy home situation any more than I had to, nor (B) burden you all with what was bringing me down. I don’t like to complain or give up, so I stuck with it for TWO ENTIRE MONTHS, but it cold did not get better. I suppose the catalyst was my mandatory mid-semester housing report; I was just supposed to like tell the next kid how to get to the nearest grocery store, but I ended up churning out a 3500 word essay about Why Living With Katja Is Terrible. This, uh, raised some red flags down at the study abroad office, and after a conversation with Britta, the housing coordinator, I decided that moving out was my best option. I told Katja Wednesday night—she didn’t take it well, what a surprise (it wasn’t really a surprise, because she sucks)—but after minimal chicanery I moved the heck out three days later.I won’t go into detail about my old situation here, for reasons A and B above. Just know that Katja sucks, a lot, and I am extremely happy that I never have to see her stupid face again.
My NEW home is in Prenzlauerberg, a much cooler neighborhood to the north of Mitte, my former Bezirk. Prenzlauerberg is cheaper and less touristy than Mitte, with lots of little bars and restaurants and some awesome parks. Do not worry, photographs and specifics are coming. I live with Anne, a 45-year-old woman who coordinates travel for disabled children and goes to punk shows, and her 18-year-old son Bastian, who likes sports and music and stuff. Anne is laid back and awfully nice, my room is private, the house is the right level of clean, and I am so happy I could cry.
I moved yesterday, and man oh man did I pick one doozy of a day. As you may know, May Day is the international worker’s holiday, and it’s a huge deal in Germany and especially Berlin. Neo-Nazis organize rallies and marches, left-wing extremists plan counter-rallies and counter-marches, wild-eyed young men with dirt under their fingernails stand on boxes and declaim to cheering crowds, millions of riot-tourists and thousands of cops pour into the city, and the whole place is generally in uproar. And I am coming to a new part of town with everything I own on me. At least I didn’t have any couches to carry.
My U-Bahn was shut down by police order, so I had to hoof it four blocks with two huge duffels and a backpack (and a 2-week beard and an American flag bandana—totally not suspicious) to a different line and work my way around to Schönhauser Allee. I think arrived just after the Nazis passed through—the socialists had stopped throwing bottles and screaming in favor of drum circles and chanting, but there were still plenty of cops in riot gear standing arm in arm. If I hadn’t been mid-move I would have photographed all of these things, but as it was I tossed my duffels in a loose shopping cart and pushed my way through the crowd.I arrived, unpacked, went back through the madness for Bikey, rode like bat outta hell through this awesome chase scene with Nazis and cops on camels and jet-bikes (note really), showered and slept and unpacked. Setting up my room took about half an hour—I really do not have many things here in Europe. Makes a man feel free.
So: I am here in my new home, and I will undoubtedly blog more about it later. What you’re all really interested in is my week-old, long overdue post about Dresden. I made some serious progress on it today and decided to break it up into two parts, one per day of Spectacular Dresden Experiences. Up first: a lovely Saturday.
Dresden. Dresden Dresden Dresden Dresden Dresden.
So much to blog that it’s hard to start. Got up early, did homework on a train, checked into a hostel, took a tram to our walking tour. I think I’ll throw up my first picture and go from there:
Wow, that thing is certainly huge and gaudy! I think it is the opera house. Aw jeeze, it was probably foolish of me to lead off with such a spectacular structure. I mean it’s not like I can just turn around and…oh, wait:
There was a giant, statue-laden Catholic church there the whole time! Actually, considering how it is both a European cathedral and a building in Dresden, this thing is relatively small and reserved; the protestant church, a certain Frauenkirche that I will show you later, is waaaaaay bigger and prettier. This is because way back in the 1600s or some crap, August der Starke (the Strong), the megalomaniacal jackass of an absolutist prince who built most of the things worth seeing in Dresden, decided that squeezing money and mistresses out of Saxony (Dresden is the capital of Saxony, now a German state) just was not cutting it anymore. Luckily for August, the King of Poland had just kicked the bucket, and the Poles had some kind of goofy “vote among the nobles” king-selection procedure, so Auggy just hopped in his gilded carriage, rolled over the Krakow, and bribed his way to the throne. Those pesky Poles were a little concerned about appointing a non-Catholic to rule over a largely Catholic nation, but August put those fears to rest by officially “converting” in a big showy ceremony, building this (relatively) small, crappy “cathedral” in his city, then continuing to do whatever the hell he wanted to.I’ll come back to August der Starke later. He’s impossible to avoid in Dresden. I’ve never liked kings, and what our tour guide told us about A the S did nothing to change my mind.
Another thing our tour guide—a stocky blonde polyglot named Sylvia—was careful to explain to us here, at the Theaterplatz, first stop on our walking tour: why these buildings look so darn dirty. See all the dark, uneven discoloration on the cathedral? It is not like fire damage or fryer grease or anything so lowly; quite the contrary, it is a classy, protective patina, like the green copper surface of the Statue of Liberty. Many of the great big pretty buildings in Dresden were built—or rebuilt, I suppose—from a particular iron-rich variety of local sandstone. When exposed to the elements, the iron in the surface of the stone gradually oxidizes and darkens, leading to this black, smeary effect on several structures. Science!
About 100 meters later I took this picture of this much cleaner building:
I think it is full of porcelain or Old Master oil paintings or something. I never went inside to check because the weather was too nice. (I got the feeling that all of these magnificent edifices have become pretty much interchangeable; you could put on opera in the church and hang paintings in the opera house and run the Sunday service in the middle of a fountain and nobody would notice.) This clean and shiny number was on the big beautiful Zwinger (from zwingen, to force), an enclosed plaza so named because back when Dresden was a walled city, this area acted as a defense mechanism. Enemy troops who made it over the wall would be tricked/channeled/forced into this enclosed space, where the Dresdeners could pick them off at their leisure. Eventually roving hoards of marauding nomads became less of a threat, and the Zwinger could serve a much higher purpose: hosting awesome parties for the super-rich.The nobles had nothing better to do than just wait for somebody to die or get married, then throw a month-long bash in the Zwinger. Drinkin’ mead on the lawn, doing some intricate dancin’ in the fountains, makin’ inappropriate advances on anything under 17 and breathing—truly, those were golden days.
When the drunken wealthy got tired of drinking by this fountain, they could stumble down a passageway and drink by this other fountain, which is really sort of outstanding in its raw excess of detail. It is just dripping with intricacies:
It also featured this crazy old man capital, which was probably the first thing I saw in Dresden that I really liked:
If you listen closely to the fountains you can almost hear him saying, “Well, it’s MY Frisbee now!”Look at this cherub by a staircase. He is plastered:
Interesting things scratched in walls, pt 1:
The official explanatory blurb on the destruction and reconstruction of the Zwinger. Worth noting here:1. The use of the verb “vernichten” (to obliterate or annihilate), which, in the context of official German text, I have seen used almost exclusively with regards to the mass executions of the Holocaust. It may seem small but I can definitely see a Berliner getting worked up over this.
2. On May 9th, 1945 the city was “liberated from fascist tyranny” by Soviet troops. Why does it say “liberated from fascist tyranny” and not “brutally ransacked (also they raped thousands of women)”? Because a Soviet wrote it! Or some East German stooge, but same difference.
3. “Already” in 1945 (wow those Soviets were so efficient) the new democractic government—in collaboration with (i.e. under orders from) Soviet command—began the effort to resurrect this monument to blithely wasteful, oppressive, reactionary decadence.
I could go on and on about this, but in the interest of not boring the living crap out of 90% of my readers, I will move on to the more accessible:
Interesting things scratched into walls, pt 2:
Uneducated Philistine that I am I cannot read Russian, but according to friendly tour guide Sylvia this says, roughly, “Checked—No Bombs.” I’d like an independent translation…any Russian-speakers in the audience tonight? I’ll bet it actually says something like, “Company A136 is the shield of the fatherland and the mighty right fist of our fearless leader, while Company A137 is a fearful dog that cowers before the wolf of fascism when he should stand and fight.”This parade of Saxon princes is the longest painting/mural/whatever it is, exactly, in the world. Or maybe just in Europe. In any case: it’s real long, and pretty neat.
I could have been real obvious and photographed August der Starke and shown you what a fat, imperious SOB he wanted to be depicted as—his mouth seems kind of swollen in this official portrait; Sylvia told us he was famous for his “sensual lips”—and also photographed the one prince who nobody liked because he “waged war on his own family” or something (disobeying your father=not cool; killing/imprisoning/impoverishing hundreds of innocents in your remorseless pursuit of even more power=totally okay). I think he was called like Friedrich der Entartete (the degraded/degenerated—another loaded term, used by the Nazis to describe abstract/Jewish art) and his portrait looks a little drunk and dirty, and his horse is trying to throw him.Where was I? Oh yes, pictures I didn’t take. Here are the pictures I did take, because I liked the nicknames. I knew about August der Starke—who, by the by, got his nickname by breaking (specially weakened) horseshoes with his hands—but I had no idea that everybody got a special little title. From left to right, these three chuckleheads are Friedrichs (you can never have too many Friedrichs) the Bitten, the Serious, and the Strict:
Who comes up with/applies these names? Is there like a special blue-ribbon prince-naming commission that meets whenever some new inbred dandy ascends the throne? Do princes get to have a nickname while they’re still alive and rulin’, or is it applied posthumously? If I were prince I would constantly be stressing out about my nickname—what will be the one adjective that everyone remembers me by? 
Do I get to be Heinrich the Illustrious, like that sumptuously tricked-out guy on the right, or Dietrich the Pestered, like the poor fella on the left?A strange little courtyard near what used to be the royal stables (now also full of oil paintings and jewels and porcelain). I like the alternating elk and ibex heads:
These bronze pillars were part of a medieval jousting arena:
Just like in A Knight’s Tale starring Heath Ledger!A highly advanced sundial with a special little ball whose shadow indicates something about the Zodiac:
I don’t know precisely what is being indicated—it looks like its in Taurus now? Any astrologers want to explain this?And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for, the obligatory photo of Dresden’s centerpiece, recently reconstructed (03-05, I believe) symbol of the city and source of great controversy, the beloved Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady):
I took a dozen photos of this thing but they all came out identically postcard pretty. The dark spots are bricks collected from the rubble of the original Frauenkirche. The whole edifice is made from that local sort of sandstone I mentioned earlier, and the stones fit together like the pieces of a puzzle; those dark, original bricks are in the exact same places they occupied in the old structure.The two interesting things in this otherwise pretty run-of-the-mill tourist photo:
1. That ridged dome in the background kind of looks like an citrus juicer, so the Dresdeners have nicknamed it The Lemon Juicer. If you are within 100 yards of this building on a weekend afternoon, you will learn this nickname about 4 times per minute.2. That jagged block of stone in shadow on the lower left is a bit of the original dome of the Frauenkirche. Thousands of pounds of rock fitted together into hundred-foot high, three-foot thick monster with nothing but air underneath. That sucker was one serious feat of engineering, aaaaaand it burned down just like everything else.
Our very informative walking tour ended here. Free entry into something like 12 museums was included in the very reasonable $85 fee for this trip (this price in good old American greenbacks because I paid it in about January), buuuuuut it was like comically pleasant weather outside, and Dresden was weird enough from the outside, so I went and lolled around on this grass by the Elbe.
The grass was long and soft, and sausage was cheap, and the beer came in giant 1 litre mugs. Not a bad afternoon.Now, do you see how I appear in the photo above? And how my arm doesn’t disappear off the edge of the frame, and I seem to be photographed from more than arm’s length distance anyways? No, I did not ask a trustworthy/slow-looking German to take a picture of me—I actually hung out with people instead of wandering around by myself taking pictures of funny ads, and I asked one of these “other people” to take this backlit off-kilter portrait. I know, I know: it was crazy selfish.
I continued my big-headed look-at-me-I-have-friends ego trip that evening, once again spending time with other people. Here are some of them, lost at night in a strange city:
From left to right, this is Jack, Alayna, and Alex. I think they are looking at a map, being confused. Our tram seemed to change its identity twice, and we eventually had to hop off, walk a ways through not-so-beautiful urban Dresden, catch a different tram, and then walk some more to get to the Neustadt, the bar-heavy, decidedly un-churchlike center of Dresden nightlife.Our first stop was a mildly hopping, vaguely grungy hipster bar that was just the right amount of filthy—like I could spit on the floor and nobody would bat an eye, but if somebody dies they generally haul the body out into the alley within like 20 minutes or so. (Note: I kid!)
Of special note here was this doorknob:
And this sweet vending machine, which was full of handmade jewelry and CDs from local bands:
I would have bought something but it was all pretty pricey. When are these foolish “artists” going to realize that mechanized mass production is the only way to turn a profit, and hence justify your existence? Also, it’s a little hard to tell, but it looks like somebody paid their 8 euros and punched in C4, but never got their little artisan button thing because it got stuck against the glass:
I’m really only noticing this now, as I look at these photos again. I probably could have whaled on the machine and gotten either1. a free button, and/or
2. kicked out of the bar, and/or
3. crushed beneath a vending machine.
So it was probably for the best that I didn’t try. Still though: free button. You don’t see that every day.
Conversation at the table turned to all the wacky old buildings we live in and their weird fixtures and locks that are probably older than America. We had a funny key contest and Alayna won by throwing down this bad boy:
I think the bottom key opens the gate to the graveyard, and the top key is for the mausoleum. No, wait, the bottom key unlocks the torture chamber in the dungeon, and the top key is for the iron maiden. No, wait, the top key gets you into the haunted windmill, but you need the bottom key to open the Gate to Hell in the basement.After a while we moved from this bar whose name I do not remember to another bar whose name I definitely remember:
Yes, that Lebowski:
Aw yeah.The Big Lebowski has always been an important flick for me, and I was a little worried that these Germans were gonna mess it up in bar form. The font on the sign was not encouraging, but the prices were reasonable, the clientele was abiding amiably, and there was some fine (and stylistically varied) character art on the walls. Along with the cartoonish visions of the Dude, the Stranger, and Jesus above, there was this impressionistic Maude:
And this awesome heroic portrait of Walter.
I couldn’t find Donny, Brad, or the nihilists, but I’ll bet they’re around there somewhere.Side note: the Germans love Jeff Bridges. Post-Oscars, only Christoph Walz (the Austrian actor who won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Inglorious Basterds) got more coverage than Mr. Bridges, and I think every single article I read about Jeff referenced The Big Lebowski.
The movie was running the whole time on these twin TVs near the back of the bar:
No sound, German subtitles. Not as funny, but still pretty funny.Yes, yes, I drank a White Russian:
It was very tasty, and essentially ended my evening. I rode/walked back to the hostel with Jack to get some sleep before our next big day in Dresden, which I will tell you about just as soon as I get the time!A little later this week, really. You know I’m good for it.
