Dresden

The train ride down the Elbe valley from Prague to Dresden was very picturesque. It was quite warm and we were grateful for some time to relax. We met a young guy on the train, a Russian PhD scientist doing post doc work in Brno, Czech, on his way to visit friends in Dresden for the weekend. We had a nice chat on the way.

When we pulled into Dresden I was a little apprehensive. I knew that the city center had been leveled at the end of WWII in just two days between Feb 13-15, 1945. I thought things had been restored to something like a classical state, however we ended up in the middle of a gigantic shopping mall. And then around the corner, was even more mall.  So knowing that we would be in Germany for the rest of the time, the next few days, we went shopping for groceries. Guess what? The bottle deposit here is A Quarter! That's fantastic! I have long said that the bottle deposit should be $.25 in the United States. It was .05 in 1976; where is your inflation now?

However a 48-hour bus/streetcar/subway ticket is a wonderful thing to have. We soon found our way to the rebuilt old section of town, and later into the outskirts and places far from the regular tourist areas. 



Of course many things are especially recreated for tourists, from buildings to street shows, but some things are genuine and original. The trick is to know the difference. I don't! Do you? Note the Knight with the cell phone.

The Germans sure did a good job of rebuilding castles out of piles of rubble.
When we went back to our hotel in the afternoon, we saw police pulling up around the train station in droves. Lots of police. Like 20-30 vans full of police. We wondered what was going on, and no one around us seemed to know either. Later, we went out again and noticed people headed towards the train station. Lots of people. People in yellow shirts. Lots and lots of people in yellow shirts. It turned out that there had been a big fußball (soccer) match earlier in the day between Dresden and some other German city's team (St Pauli, Hamburg, of St. Pauli Girl beer fame), and the police were geared up for the worst. The only major repercussion that we noticed was that the trashcans in the central park that afternoon were waaay overfilled with everything from liquor bottles to McDonald's wrappers. Apparently Dresden won.

Here is an example of Dresden style architecture to compare with Vienna and Prague shown earlier. What do you think? And how is it different from the soviet style flats that are everywhere from here to the Black Sea coast?

The east side of the Elbe is quite hilly here and there are several of these seilbahns dating from the late 19th century going from the river up to neighborhoods in the heights above.