Tourgasm with Pecos, part I: Dresden

Sheer delight is not a phrase most people use when describing the feeling they get when they enter a hostel room. Hostel rooms are pretty much known throughout this planet (and that other potentially habitable earth-like planet they just found 5 billion light years away) as low-budget smell caves where 16 drunk college-aged Americans yelling “OH YEAH! SPRING BREAK! HOP ON BOARD THE DRUNK TRAIN! WOOOWOOOO!!” cram into a room to “sleep.”

On occasion, though, some hostel rooms are delightful. Clean. Functional. Free of college-aged nocturnal beasts (who are found commonly throughout the major metropolitan areas of Europe).

The hostel room we stayed at in Dresden was just that. And it was apparently a harbinger for other delightful hostel rooms. Here you can see why.

Without any prior notice, Kate and I entered our room to find a car with a bed in it. A real car. And a real mattress. The car was a Trabant, the most common vehicle in the former East Germany, known for being compact, fast, durable, and smoky (thanks to the poor performance of its poorly made two-stroke engine). And although we didn’t sleep in it because there were two beds in the loft above, the bed was comfortable, allowing Pecos and me to nap for a couple minutes early in the evening.

After coming down from the silliness high of HAVING A FLIPPING CAR IN THE ROOM, we realized we had just spent five hours starting this tour of Eastern Germany and Poland, so we might as well go out there and have fun.
Our hostel was in the Neustadt (new city), the less-touristy region north of the Elbe River known for NOT being the Altstadt (old city). It’s here where the locals go to shop, eat, drink, drink, and drink some more. There are 50 bars per square kilometer, almost ensuring something for everyone’s taste. Although it’s call the Neustadt, it’s still very old, with cobblestone streets and a varied array of architectural styles (mostly because the city was so heavily bombed in World War II).

So, unaware of all this, Kate and I went out into the city at night ostensibly to eat Döner kebabs and walk around. We found lots of young, urban, hip, perhaps a little punky people drinking on the street, watching the crowds go by, smoking, dancing, and eating at outdoor cafes. It was a Wednesday night, but it felt like a Saturday.
But, as we’re already old bags whose idea of a wild night is to have a glass of wine when we sit on our sofa watching Lost, we merely ate our kebabs and called it a night.

The next morning, we ventured down the shop-lined main street (Hauptstrasse), which was in the middle of hosting a pretty tame but good natured Fruehlings Fest (spring fest). This meant there were tons of small booths selling local wares, baked goods, sausage, and commercial commodities such as yummy processed fish sandwiches. Yay for processed fish! Then, on past a shiny statue of August the somebody we went, crossing over the Elbe River on the Augustbrücke and into the famed Altstadt.

Dresden’s Altstadt is famous. Maybe not to you and me, but once upon a time (between 1660 and the 1820s) it was one of the most touristed destinations in Europe thanks to its having a lasting spot on the “hot list” for European travelers’ itineraries then. Rich tourists then, particularly young British upperclassmen, usually took year-long educational rites of passage where they’d travel the continent learning about culture, aristocracy, fashion, and on very special occasions, schnapps.

To those of us who lived most of our lives after the two world wars, Dresden is known as one of the most horribly and controversially bombed cities during the war.

Here’s a pic I found of the main church in Dresden (the Frauenkirche) after the war.

And here it is today (with me in front, of course).

Here are some other ruins.

And here are some reconstructed buildings.

As you can see, the city has been restored to prewar (i.e., mostly Baroque) splendor and is beautiful. Kate and I compared it both to Prague (incontestably gorgeous) and Vienna (our favorite city) while there. Unfortunately for Dresden, the entire city smelled like pickles. Seriously. Pickles.

Other than the famous Frauenkirche, we walked around two other important and impressive sights. The first was the royal castle, once home to August the somebody (Strong, I think…King of Poland). Due to repeated additions, the castle has integrated elements of the Renaissance, Baroque and Classicist styles and was semi-fun.

The second was the Zwinger Palace, across the road from the castle, which has been converted to a center for the royal art collections and a place to hold festivals. It even had a moat and a golden-crown-topped gate! (This is the first image, btw).

Moat aside and HUGE CROWN aside, we both thought it was incredibly impressive, with a sandy walking area in the center and carved paths of well maintained green grass on the outside. From ground level, the paths looked snaky and weird. But from above, the paths formed intricate and beautiful designs.

Well, by that time, Pecos was hot, I was going blind from forgetting my sunglasses in the car, and Kate was eager to get on the road to start our three-hour border-crossing transit to our next destination, the completely unpronounceable Wrocław, Poland.

For about 500 years it was German territory and they called it Breslau. After WWII, though, the Slav beneficiaries – who were never too keen on simple words – were unaware that the simpler the name of a city is for foreigners to say, the more likely it is to get tourists (Paris, London, etc. vs. Tlaquepaque, Shijiazhuang). So, they changed it to Wrocław (complete with the funny looking L). This is pronounced VROT-swof and that city will be part II.