Living in Dresden, pt. 2

So I didn't have time to finish this post last week before I headed off and did some intense traveling. But I think I'll finish it first anyway. As much as I enjoyed describing Löbtau, I feel it only appropriate to now zoom out a bit and talk about Dresden as a whole.




Life in Dresden

Now, that gorgeous building on the right is the Frauenkirche, one of Dresden's most famous architectural pieces, and rightfully so. I don't know why it's called Frauenkirche, which means Women's Church. I've never been inside.

In fact, I've never been inside any of Dresden's most famous places. I haven't gone sightseeing and I haven't visited any of the museums or art galleries or, really, any of the tourist attractions at all. I suppose this is because I am not a tourist. I just live here! (muahaha.) And because I live here, I get to see the stunningly beautiful city of Dresden whenever I want. But please don't think I take it for granted.

I am convinced that Dresden is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Jeff often quotes Vonnegut's description of seeing it as "dying and going to Baroque Heaven." I can't even imagine what view Vonnegut saw before the firebombing, since I know there's no way everything could be replaced. Boxy concrete GDR high rises now mark the holes where buildings of the old city are missing. But what is there today seems almost more impressive that so much of it was painstakingly rebuilt... evidence that humans are still capable of building extraordinarily beautiful architecture, even though we don't really, anymore. The most famous places, the Schloss, the Zwinger, the Opera House, the Frauenkirche, are all located in Altstadt, right along the River Elbe, and any time you cross the river on any of the bridges you are presented with an absolutely breathtaking view... the Germans are all used to it, of course, but although I've already been here several weeks I still find myself glued to the window every time I cross by tram or being forced to stop for a few minutes if I cross by foot. This is the best picture of the View that I can offer at the moment.



It's fantastic. This is taken from a biergarten right on the Elbe there, one of our favorites, at which one can partake in the activity of Elbenbiering, as Jeff has labeled it. Really, a lot of my time in Germany is spent hanging around and drinking bier in different locations. But moving on. Sort of.



I Have a Hero and His Name is Isaac Riisness

That's the name of a facebook group I would join if it weren't Tulane-only. I stayed in Dresden last weekend largely because I was still recovering from my accident, but it worked out that I would have wanted to stay anyway because my good friend (and hero) from high school Isaac Riisness traveled to Dresden that weekend. Isaac and his friend Andrea are both doing similar internship programs to mine, and since they live in Bavaria and get extra holidays (damn Catholics) they decided to travel to Dresden-- a first for Andrea, but Isaac lived here for six months in 2005, and so actually knows the city better than I do. When Jeff, Navin (another American in Dresden) and I met him at that beautiful above-pictured Frauenkirche last Friday evening, he took us to his favorite restaurant, a great German place on the Elbe. I'm not good about eating real German cuisine, but this restaurant was wonderful, and we got the waitress to take a nice picture, which I will of course provide now.

That's Andrea sitting next to Jeff. Bet you can't guess which one's Navin.

By the way, I get major props for not drinking bier that night. It was hard, since everyone had bier at the restaurant, and then more bier at the biergarten, and then more bier at the biergarten, and then more bier at the biergarten. Later, we went to a club, which was fun but unimpressive. I have yet to find a good club in Dresden. But then, I haven't been trying that hard, I'm not a big club person.

Activities for the ensuing days were further representations of simply living in Dresden, and can be basically viewed in the context of drinking bier in a variety of locations.

Samstag (Saturday): Elbenbiering with Isaac and Andrea



So the place to go out in Dresden is the trendy-awesome-Fauberg-Marigny part of town north of the Elbe, the Neustadt, which I'll actually describe in more detail in later posts. Isaac, Andrea and I went to Katy's Garage, a popular club/biergarten, and then got some biers at the grocery store and walked back south across the river to drink them in the midst of this view. (Again, I was refraining for the sake of my head. For the last day.) Afterwards, Isaac and I walked through Neustadt and fairly far east of that, looking to see what was going on. We eventually made it to a goth dance club called U-Boot, quite similar (if more German) than one of Isaac's favorite places in the Quarter, the Dervish, which I've been to a couple times. I wasn't that up for dancing though, so Isaac walked me nearly to the tram stop and then we said farewell and he went back to dance it up till 4, like he does.

I was sure I could find my way back, and it would have worked fine had I not accidentally happened upon some tear in the fabric of space-time that allowed me to walk in the right direction, chase down a tram going in that same right direction, ride that tram going in that same right direction for several stops, and later discover that it was in fact going in the opposite direction, far far away from my apartment in Löbtau. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out at what point I turned around, so I assume that it must have been some physics-defying accident. Yup. It took a long time to correct this mistake, and involved running down several other trams, but I did finally make it home and I had my silly (but free!) ipod nano to provide an exciting soundtrack.

Sonntag (Sunday): Gartenbiering with Jeff and Jess

Actually, first I went to the zoo.

Sunday was one of those days that I was alone for a while and decided that I really wanted to do something and so I was sitting around contemplating how to fix this when I remembered the Zoo was open on Sundays. I only had two hours before it closed so I rushed out the door and caught a tram down to Grosser Garten, where it's located. Now, I have grown up very spoiled by the Audubon Zoo, so its hard for me to be impressed by the little Dresden one, but after several weeks of working exclusively with zooplankton I was really longing for macroscopic animals. The Dresden Zoo did have a nice selection of elephants, which are important and undeniably macroscopic. I also had a nice chat with the lioness but eventually she got bored and decided to take a nap.



It was interesting because there were a lot of species I'd never seen before. They had some Pyxicephalus sp., African Bullfrogs, which are gigantic, and not the most attractive frogs. More exciting, they had two Dipsochelys arnoldi, Arnold's Giant Tortoises, from the Seychelles Islands; not as big as the Audubon Zoo's Galapogos guys, but quite large. Sadly I discovered the "underground" part only ten minutes before the zoo closed, but it was pretty sparse. They did have a nice Feuersalamander, Salamandra salamandra, which I'm hoping to find this weekend when I go hiking, and they also had some newts that I'll have to go back and examine more closely because I don't remember the species names. And like one snake, a Lampropeltis from Central America.

Oh, I think there were some birds and mammals too. ;)


But yes, after the Zoo I met up with Jeff and Jess for some bier in front of the Schloss (Palace) in Grosser Garten. It was absolutely beautiful, and it was then that I took one of my favorite pictures so far. I think the clouds make it look almost surreal:


Mittwoch (Wednesday): Barbecue-biering with the Hydrobiologie Workgroup

After work Wednesday everyone from my building, the Hydrobiology Department (the GDR had a different way of organizing colleges; at TU Dresden, every study having to do with water, whether Limnology, Hydrology, Hydro-Engineering, or Water Chemistry, are all lumped together) had a barbecue. This meant that at lunch we went to the grocery store and bought some meat and a case of bier, and at 17:00 we started what ended up being the longest barbecue I've ever attended. Behind our building there's a large yard with a grill and some picnice benches. We barbecued lots of wursts, of course, and some steaks, and these were accompanied by bread from the bakery and by Nudelsalat, a required component of barbecues which I really should learn how to make. But the eating really only comprised the first hour. For the next five hours we sat around and talked and drank biers (and also whiskey, actually, out of little lab glasses, sufficiently nerdy of us scientists.) I don't remember the last time I've stayed in one place for so long. It was incredibly enjoyable, and very German, but I didn't get home till pretty late, considering I was coming from work.



(Here I'm being toasted by one of the most exceedingly German-looking Germans I've met so far, Matty, who's about 6'6" or something insane. These are the lab vials we were using. I was assured they were new. I think I got the whiskey bottle in the shot too.)


Donnerstag (Thursday): Strassenbiering with Jeff

Jeff's all-time favorite past time is hanging out somewhere random, drinking bier, and people watching, and so Thursday after work I joined him, and suggested we get döner at my favorite döner place, Ararat-- which is not my personal döner place but is in Neustadt instead.

Ararat is actually a full restaurant and not just a little stand or hole-in-the-wall. It's also about the only Döner place that is distinguishable from the others enough to have character, which it has in abundance, due to a very fun workstaff. The first time I went in there I was standing in a large circle of Americans (we had some spare Ohio kids) trying to decide what to get when I heard a high-pitched, well, yelp behind me and turned around to find a grinning, gorgeous Turkish guy with a tray of little glasses of green apple-tea, which are complimentary at the restaurant Döner places. (Yes, people, a free drink in Europe. It even contains water!) The entire group of guys behind the counter were very lively and joking and helpful and with their help I ended up ordering not döner but a dish I'd had at the Turkish restaurant in Darmstadt last summer, Sigara Borek, which are something akin to taquitos with middle-eastern bread and cheese. Anyway, by the time we left the place I was a fan, and glad to return.

So after döner-dinner Jeff and I simply walked across the street from Ararat and sat down for bier, and right as we were about to leave we met an interesting, and highly diverse, group of people, composed of a Russian, a Syrian, a trashed Polish guy, and a Greek who was drunk to point of idiocy, rather past "trashed." The Greek and the Pole weren't much good for conversation, but Daniel the Russian was very interested in meeting us, and Saleem (sp?) the Syrian spoke pretty good English. "I watch a lot of American movies," Daniel explained seriously, "and Russians are always, always bad guys!" Saleem joked that we were surrounded by enemies, as he's an Arab. When I pointed out that, really, the Germans were always portrayed as bad guys too, the whole situation was pretty absurd. I guess that's the result of one country dominating the international movie scene. We make movies about ourselves and our history. Fortunately these guys didn't resent us being American. I've yet to meet someone who does, but then, I've been in Germany the whole time.

OK! That's a pretty good overview of Dresden in a week, and this post is so long I don't know if I can post it. Now I can finally start trying to record this weekend. Thanks for reading!