Dresden Dresden Dresden Dresden Dresden, Part 2

Sunday Sunday Sunday in Dresden.

Let’s see: “Dresden is an ancient city with a complex and, to my mind, unsettling attitude towards its history, deserving of a wordy and elevated introduction like this one; as a city obsessed with, and terribly proud of, its past, Dresden provides a fascinating counterpart to guilt-ridden Berlin, and a sort of an insight into what the Hauptstadt could be like today if not for the powerful influence of the West through the island city of West Berlin and the free media broadcasts that couldn’t penetrate Dresden’s low-slung topography on the banks of the Elbe, that great vein and artery of time and progress through the heart of Germany and a little bit into the Czech Republic I guess, the…”

Oh screw it. Here’s a photo of my breakfast:

if it ain’t broke don’t fix it

They kept foisting food on us the whole trip, which I guess is better than, you know, not getting a lot of free meals. I wasn’t very hungry for this one, but I knew I had a big expensive day ahead of me, so I buckled down and powered through some Müsli, OJ, a ham & provolone sandwich on a snow-white roll, and I’d say about 4 of those piddling little cups of coffee.

Dresden is a little frou-frou, I guess because the “golden age” they’re constantly harking back to around here was so frou-frou.* This city wants to be refined and proper as a 17th Century court, with like pages in white leggings carrying lavender-scented face powders and highly suggestive sonnets between fops and ladies-in-waiting. I mean, look at this thing in the lobby of the hostel:And just for giggles let’s zoom in on the executioner with bad teeth and a tricorner hat, and his squealing, kneeling victim:And that was such a stupid, boring, insanely unjust society! These people never bathed because they believed all water carried disease—when you started to stink you just poured some more orange oil in your wig! And the money you spent on that little crystal bottle of orange oil could have kept a family of filthy, diseased peasants in hard tack and salt pork for a week! Repressive, reactionary, image-obsessed, anti-Semitic, shallow, selfish, stupid, stupid, stupid. Did I mention I don’t like kings? Well, the royal court system sucked, too. If I were writing a paper right now, I would make a pompous reference to Madame Bovary.

*Fun fact: frou-frou is a French term, derived from the rustling noise made by someone walking in a dress.

As I mentioned last post, my weekend in Dresden took place in unprecedented (in my time in Europe) excellent weather. Sunday in particular was a full-fledged beautiful summer day. It was a privilege just to be outside. Everybody seemed to be moving a little slower than normal, trying to soak up the warmth and sun and the cool fresh breeze.

I never wanted to go indoors and Dresden obliged me with a full roster of outside points of interest. Here are some people running a long distance race in front of a red-pantsed Dixieland band: The saxaphonist/lead singer kept giving shout-outs to the runners, and some of them would wave to the crowd to considerable applause (the Germans love physical fitness). More of this band later.

Our first and only planned activity for the day was a Schifffahrt (boat trip) along the Elbe through the thick part of town. No, we did not get to ride on August der Starke. Insert “August der Starke was a disgusting lothario who fathered hundreds of illegitimate children” joke here.

We rode on the next boat in line, an identical steamship whose name I didn’t bother to record. Oh, and you read correctly: I said STEAMSHIP. See? These big shiny pistons and cranks were running like a well-oiled machine. Ha ha, steam engine humor, I hope the boiler doesn’t explode (it didn’t).

We were a little late for the boat tour, and I guess they must have badly oversold it because there were literally zero seats for our entire 20 person group. I started out below decks, lolling around some cool comfy booths in this empty little bar/restaurant, then ventured up the stairs at about the halfway point to stand around and take some photos.

This is a vaguely blue steel suspension bridge that our mechanical audio tour guide breathlessly referred to as “das Blaues Wunder” (the Blue Wonder): It was green at first, but sunlight bleached out the yellow because the paint was of low quality—so that’s, uh, that’s pretty wonderful. Oh, and I guess the Nazis wanted to blow it up as they left town to slow down the Russkies, but a group of heroic Dresdeners acted to deactivate the charges and save the bridge. That’s Dresden for you: so they took all the Jews or whatever, but I’ll die before I let ‘em touch our wonderful blue bridge!

There was some kind of Dixieland Jazz festival going on along the river. These cheerleaders gave us a big hello when we drifted by, and the captain replied with a blast from the insanely loud steam whistle. I probably jumped a foot in the air when that thing went off.

Here are some big ridiculous mansions with vineyards in front of them. Along the entire stretch people were lusting aloud after these things, like developing these big fantasies where they got to live in these ridiculous houses. I do not see the attraction. (This is why I will never get ahead in life.)

Aaaaaaand I took some more photos on the boat, but none worth posting here. Things got more interesting once we disembarked anyways. Having had my fill of “other human beings” the day before, I peeled off from the group and tripped on down the riverbank.

This bridge may not look like much but it had some awesome echo/reverb effects:I could click my tongue or snap my fingers, and a half second later the sound would bounce back to me, magnified and distorted. It was neat! But before I could compose my echo-opus my puny body percussion was totally drowned out by a highly amplified band. Say, it’s those same red-pantsed fellas from earlier!I told you they’d be back.

These guys were rocking their way through Down By The Riverside when I walked by. The saxophonist was grooving and jamming his way up and down the sidewalk. They attracted quite a crowd:They were fairly tight, and I dug the coordinated outfits and layered sound, but they were not quite top-notch—I’m pretty sure I’ve seen better Dixieland at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. Something I’ve noticed about German (rock) musicians: though they can be rock solid technically, they often lack the spirit/soul/fire to really make a guitar or a keyboard sing, or to, uh, sing. I’ve seen them have much more success with wind instruments, and this band was no exception—the bandleader played a fine sax, and the trumpet player (center, w/ mustache, chest hair, grey-black mane blowing majestically about. I highly recommend you click for a closer view) had some serious chops.Oh, and as I mentioned, they were highly amplified. These guys seemed quite set up to me:

we can always use some more electrical equipment

Yes, amplification was not lacking. You could hear them a quarter klick inland, and those spirited southern rhythms carried quite a ways down the river.

Still within earshot, I clambered up to the elevated plaza thing above the riverbank, and then took this photo because I need to build up my portfolio if I want to get a job taking pictures for cheesy calendars:
I sat down in this little geometric grove and unpacked the fairly crappy but edible and free bag lunch they’d handed out at the hostel before we left:I had assumed that the brown rectangle was a single sandwich of regular thickness. It turned out to be two very thin sandwiches, each featuring a comically meager filling sandwiched (if you will) between two slices of ancient bread of roughly the same consistency and as moldy cardboard, or possible very old cork:I doubled up my filling and got rid of the extra bread, thus transforming two terrible sandwiches into one bad sandwich. This is how I felt about the bad sandwich:I took a bite, and while waiting for my saliva to dissolve it down to “chewable,” I took this picture because I could:Feeling appropriately poor, I choked down the whole lunch. I love good food, but I also appreciate my ability to fuel up on cheap, tasteless, but fairly healthy crap. Then, more solo Dresden photo adventures—look, pretty girls in white dresses!I liked these sort of exhausted and pensive-looking dames in white gowns so much that I took a couple of steps and lined up another shot with a little less aqua-clad tourist in it. They spotted me just before I hit the button and straightened/brightened up into proper Dresden ladies again.Arms straight along torso, crossed over abdomen seems to be the company-approved posture.

My name is Max and I like fountains and flowers.I am going to create a separate blog just for pictures of fountains and flowers.It will be called,“Fountains& Flowers.”
Oh, something I forgot to mention in my comments above on German musicians: they’re not the most passionate drummers in the world, but they can keep a beat. This all-white all-in-white crew looked like they’d been drilling for weeks in preparation for today’s routine on this empty stretch of grass for no one in particular:I think the runners appreciated it.

I turned inland in search of coffee. This dude had set up a sprinkler at one end of his greenhouse’s roof and was taking advantage of the lovely weather to diligently mop down the glass:It looked pretty fun, or at least satisfying. Also slippery.

Here is something you would never see in Berlin: dudes singing some opera with accordion accompaniment, which is all well and good, but doing it in MILITARY UNIFORM and JACKBOOTS. That strikes me as a still fairly outrageous thing to do in Deutschland. In Berlin they probably would have gotten like pelted with tomatoes and then had a piano dropped on them. Here they finished up their set and then started strutting around in what I found to be a pretty pompous fashion. Especially the guy in the hat who is coming pretty close to a Nazi salute in the photo.

But you know what? They fit in pretty well here in Dresden. I guess I was in the thick of the prettiest part of town on a beautiful day, but the whole town had a confidence about it that was downright eerie. The Dresdeners I saw and spoke with seemed strangely proud and happy, and free of the guilt that plagues Berliners.

Und jetzt beginnen wire in kleines Experiment—ich blogge auf deutsch! Keine Sorge, lieber nicht deutschsprechende Leute; ich schreibe nur einen kleinen Stuck auf deutsch, und er wird natürlich auf englisch übersetzt werden.

(And now we begin a little experiment—I’m blogging in German! Don’t worry, non-German speakers; I’m only writing a little bit in German, and of course it will be translated into English.)

Dresden war und bleibt ein Zentrum von altmodischer und reationärer Politik, extrem Konservatismus, und Antisemitismus; aber obwohl Dresden eine wichtige Nazistadt war, die nationalsozialistische politische Ideen stark unterstutzt hat, sieht die Stadt sich als Opfer des Dritten Reichs und zweiten Weltkriegs.

(Dresden was, and remains, a center of old-fashioned and reactionary politics, extreme conservatism, and anti-Semitism; but although Dresden was an important urban center for the Nazi party, with a populace that strongly supported national-socialist ideaology, the city sees itself as a victem of the Third Reich, and the Second World War.)

Im Gegensatz zu Berlin, wo man kann nicht zehn Schritten machen, ohne ein Denkmal zu den Opfern der Naziismus zu finden, in Dresden bleibt der Krieg immer in Hintergrund—wenn er überhaupt anerkennt wird, geht die Diskussion fast nur um die “sinnlose und brutale” Zerstörung der Stadt durch einen allierten Bombenangriff. Von diesem Standpunkt aus war Dresden eine harmlose Kulturstadt—Juwel der Elbe, Venedig des Nordes, etc—die keine Rolle in Deutschlands Verbrechungen spielte. Der Dresdener zeigt lieber auf Bilder von zusammengefallenen Kirchen als auf Bilder von Konzentrationslager. Er wäre nichts lieber, als auf einem wiederaufgebauten Architecturwunder zu deuten und zu sagen, “Siehst du? Es ist als ob der Krieg nicht passiert ist!”; für ein Berliner gibt’s keine größere Sünde.

(In contrast to Berlin, where one can’t take 10 steps without finding another memorial to the victims of Nazism, in Dresden the war always remains in the background—if it’s mentioned at all, the discussion focuses almost solely on the “senseless and brutal” destruction of the city in an Allied bomb attack. From this point of view, Dresden was just a harmless city of culture—Jewel of the Elbe, Venice of the north, etc—that played no role in Germany’s crimes. The Dresdener would rather show you a picture of a collapsed church than a picture of a concentration camp. He likes nothing more than to point at some reconstructed architectural wonder and say, “See? It’s like the war never happened!”; for a Berliner, there’s no greater sin.)

END self-important serious section. RESUME funny pictures + amusing anecdotes.

Dresden is a little frou-frou, pt 2:
With all of this gawking and walking I got fairly hot, thirsty, and beat, so when I saw “Eiskaffee” (iced coffee) on a sidewalk chalkboard, I pulled up a chair and started visualizing a big black cup of ice cold coffee, maybe with cubes of frozen coffee bobbing in it. My cash reserves were running pretty low by this point, but I checked the menu and confirmed that my 2.80 in euro-change would cover a 2.10 cuppa joe. About 15 minute later this thing arrived:It was like a coffee milkshake. I would put its coffee content at maybe 35%--the rest was cream, sugar, chocolate syrup, and a friggin’ cookie on top. Oh, and I think it literally contained a scoop of ice cream. It was nuts, and not at all the straight cold bitter beverage I was hoping for, but I choked it down anyways, disbelieving.

I was wiping some whipped cream off my nose when I noticed that I was drinking this travesty at a “Canadian Steakhouse”, which made it a little more ridicuous:Canadians are tough, man. They drink their coffee black as a moonless winter night in Saskatchewan, then go out and die of exposure. This is some sort of crazy milquetoast Dresden Canada:The text reads “Experience a bit of Canada in Dresden.”

Anyways, I drank the thing and, after quite a bit of eye-catching, hand-waving, and signature-pantomiming I finally got the bill. (German waiters don’t work for tips, so they stink.) As you may have expected, my big creamy “Eiskaffee” production cost considerably more than a regular cup of coffee, and I was about 70 euro-cents short. I showed the waiter my handful of change and asked where the nearest ATM was. He counted it and was in such a good mood—probably from giving poor service to tourists who don’t know not to tip—that he took pity and told me “Das reicht” (That’s enough/fine/okay). So that was nice.

Look quick! I think I saw a wild fop!I did! I did see a wild fop!This guy was really making tracks across the plaza in his breeches, wig, and low heels. It was like trying to photograph Historical Reenactment Bigfoot. On the plus side, the guy in focus/in the middle of the second photo is looking pretty goofy.

Cool things in Dresden:
1. This neat bike streetlight made me miss Bikey. I totally could have chased down that lord in red and made him strike an imperial pose next to a horse or something.
2. This little tween dance crew was pretty funny. They sucked for the most part, but I somehow managed to photograph the coolest moment of their entire routine.The dude in the back is even grabbing his head, like he’s yelling “Daaaaaaaaaaaaamn!”

On the walk back to the hostel I took this photo of Dresden’s old fashioned Hauptbahnhof (main train station). Feel free to make comparisons to Berlin’s ultramodern, glass-n-steel Hauptbahnhof.

Back at the hostel I did some French homework (I was worried about not getting any work done in Dresden, but I actually ended up with a lot of downtime that turned into study time. Go me!), wrote a couple postcards, then ventured off in search of cheap food. I asked the clerk at the hostel if he could recommend a good Döner joint, and he pointed out the window at the Turkish place across the street. Look at this thing:It was cheap, and very pretty on its shiny chrome plate in the late afternoon sun, but really not very good. GUESS WHO ATE IT ANYWAYS. (Me, I ate it anyways.)

Man, have I even explained Döners on this blog yet? Alright, quick primer: Döner is the archetypal German street food. Each one consists of a piece of flatbread filled with lettuce, cabbage, onions, yogurt/garlic/spicy sauce, and a mysterious sort of hyper-processed meat that they shave off of a huge rotating meat cylinder. They’re cheap, terrible for you, and intermittently delicious. I ate this one in the grassy front yard of the restaurant, with some tasty Turkish sweets and a Hefeweisen:
I was pretty thoroughly tired at this point, so I walked off towards the tracks and found a surprisingly wild little stretch of green to catch a few Zs in.I was tired enough that I really did sleep, despite the fact that the ground was covered with dead thorny branches from all these thorny trees:And, more mysteriously, thousands of very pretty little snail shells:Most unusual. Maybe this meadow is a shallow sea in mid-summer, or like a secret Snail Burial Ground or something.

After my nap I sauntered back to the hostel, met up with the group, and rolled back to the Bahnhof. Goodbye, Dresden. You were beautiful but annoyingly sure of yourself and eerily clean. You made me very happy to get back to dirty nervous Berlin.

OOF DA. Well, that only took two entire weeks. I plan to spend this weekend catching up on schoolwork and making photographic explorations of my awesome new neighborhood. Back again real soon!