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!
This weekend yielded no epic Adventures to castles or hospitals, but instead emphasized the fact that I have really just moved to another country and now I live here. So this entry in my "travel blog" is not about traveling. It is about Not Traveling.
Living in Löbtau
This gorgeous building to the right is my apartment.
The area of Dresden that I live in is called Löbtau, west of the central part of the city. It does mean that I have to use the expensive tram system more often, and that I need to build in travel time getting to the University or to Neustadt or to just about anything. But on the other hand I live in a beautiful old neighborhood with affordable rent. And that I can shamelessly label everything in this part of town as my own.
Most of Löbtau is large apartment buildings like mine with shops on the first floor and residences (and sometimes Cytology Laboratories) above. These were built at the turn of the last century, largely survived the bombing, and were nearly all renovated in the past ten years, so they're all beautiful and freshly painted and picturesque, and in the morning my walk to the bus stop (and, someday again, my bike ride to work) presents me with views like this.
These buildings are one block south of my apartment, at Conertplatz. Several times an hour, the convenient but obnoxiously loud 12 line rumbles to and from the Conertplatz stop past my windows. Located at Conertplatz are my Döner Place and my Bakery.
Actually, my Döner Place acts primarily as my fridge, because it is the easiest source of refrigerated coke. From what I can tell, Dresdners do not drink coke. At all. They sell it, but I've never seen anyone over here drink it. This may be a result of Coca-Cola being one of those more recent western introductions. I don't like drinking coke out of 2-liter bottles because it tends to go flat on me, but even if I had a 2-liter (which I did, last week, one of my get-well presents) I wouldn't dare waste precious fridge-space on it. My Döner Place tends to be a bit German in its refrigeration temperatures-- if you find the right one, Turks are much more likely to keep drinks TRULY cold-- but it's better than nothing. Additionally, My Döner Place advertises the Mini-Döner, only 1.50 euro, which is actually small enough for me to finish. So I'm a fan.
My Bakery is totally awesome. I don't just have a Backerei, I have a Feinbackerei, and it is indeed very fine. It is lovely, very pretty on the inside, the baked goods are all on little doilies and there are flowers and just what you'd want at a nice lovely little bakery. It's a small operation, so it has tricky hours, but the lady who owns it works there the whole time and must recognize me and my stilted German by now. It is the first bakery I've found here that has Erdbeertortchen, those marvelous little strawberry torts that I was introduced to on my first trip to Europe five years ago in Switzerland. If I don't have to start work too early, I have time to go by every morning for breakfast. And it is essential to go every other day in order to buy Brötchen so that I have BREAD for any later meal I might want. The first weekend I was in Germany I made the mistake of buying a loaf of bread and it went stale before I'd finished a quarter of it. The Brötchen method works much better. And Bakery goods are fantastically cheap. This morning I bought a piece of Streuselküchen, an Erdbeertortchen, and zwei Doppelbrötchen for 2.10. That's insane. I think the first place I walked to after my fall was this bakery.
On the way home from the bakery I can cross the street to the other side of Conertplatz-- my park-- and eat my cake or drink my cold coke on a park bench surrounded by roses. I have not made enough use of this park and intend to fix this soon.
Occasionally I leave my own street (and the street connecting me to more bus/tram stops) to explore more of my Löbtau neighborhood, which is composed of similar lovely apartment buildings on enviably quieter streets. The closest cheap grocery store, Netto, is located somewhere back there-- when I tried to find it Saturday afternoon I eventually had to loop back and admit to flatmate Christoph that I'd lost the thing-- but when I finally made it there and bought groceries for myself it was wonderful. All day Sunday I reveled in how many choices I had for each meal. A few days later, these are declining quickly, and I should go shopping again soon, I suppose.
Hmm, that's Löbtau for the moment, though I think I'll probably update it later with some more pictures, including one of the late Erdbeertortchen from this morning. Despite the blue sky and fluffy white clouds, Dresden has pulled one of its surprise rains on me, but I still need to make my way to downtown to run some errands-- specifically, replace the dead Handy and buy a helmet-- before I start work at... 4:00 this afternoon. Sigh.
I was going to update this sooner but I unexpectedly lost internet last night.
So, Saturday. I'll try to relay this without sounding too much like Jeff's blog.
Jeff and I got a later start Saturday than planned, but the wonderful thing about living this far north during the summer is the nearly infinite sunlight, so starting a trip at 2:00 still leaves hours and hours before dark. We started at my apartment, or rather a bakery near my apartment to buy brötchen for sandwiches, like you do, and assembled these sandwiches at my apartment before setting out. On the wrong road, actually, but the mistake was quickly caught and fixed.
Happily, reaching the Elbe proved not to be very difficult, despite the fact that it required riding off my map and into (presumably) unchartered area. We were immediately presented with a lovely view of wide, open fields and an innocent bike path and other bikers riding without helmets. I'll provide it now for illustration.
The sky was kind of grayish-overcast, not lovely Athens-blue, but this made very nice weather for bike-riding.
It wasn't long before we came across a beautiful old windmill across a field of tall grass. We rejoiced in its blatant European-ness in the only manner appropriate: we decided to frolic. In cases where the English language allows so few opportunities to employ a verb, these opportunities must be grasped when they arise. (Still waiting for a chance to use "to defenestrate.") See Jeff's blog for illustration.
The windmill itself, which I have included here in an imposing, artsy view, was further cause for celebration by everyone, not just English verb enthusiasts. We celebrated the windmill by eating the first (and, for me, last) set of the six sandwiches we'd prepared. The Germans had already celebrated by establishing a biergarten there. Complete with ice cream.
But we passed up the usual temptations and continued on our journey, which presented many more lovely views, several of which included those flowers you make opium with (as described by my mentor Matthias when I showed him the pictures) (hey, "poppy" isn't a word they teach you in school) and several of which included cute little German towns and accompanying biergartens.
I remember (now, as I revel in the ability to remember Saturday) coming across spray-painted signs for Trinkwasser ahead, and sure enough the arrows led us to an interesting water fountain, which Jeff models for us here on the right. Check out that helmet. He's smart.
And that's the end of the pictures, folks.
About an hour ? further down the road-- we'd just come around this spectacular cliff-face-- something went very wrong and I ended up on the ground in a fantastic amount of pain. Somebody made me sit up, I suppose it was Jeff, and I vaguely remember various Germans stopping and asking questions...
Amnesia is not fun, but in case you've never tried it yourself (and I don't recommend it) I'll try to describe my version. I knew I was somewhere along the Elbe, I knew we were planning on going to Meissen, and that was it. I had no idea where on the Elbe we were or how long we'd been going. It was very similar to waking up from a dream, and knowing you dreamt something, and trying very hard to hold on to the images from the dream, in no particular order, before you forget them. Jeff asked me if I remembered the robot water fountain, and I didn't, and then I did very vaguely, and I didn't believe it was real. And as to what happened during the accident itself, I was coming up completely blank.
I had placed the cell phone I'd bought the day before "just in case" in my left pocket, and it was pretty much destroyed in the fall. But other people had cell phones, someone called an ambulance eventually, I didn't even realize that-- to me it just appeared out of no where-- and thank God I'd placed my passport and a list of phone numbers in a pocket in my bag that I could remember and access. I also had enough sense to direct Jeff to take my map when they wouldn't let him come in the ambulance with us.
I remember thinking one of the ambulance guys was cute.
And so this started my two-night stay in a German hospital, which was not exciting. My roommates and my mentor all met me at the hospital and helped translate, which was very nice. By Saturday evening (I think, mostly I just slept) most of the memories of Saturday-day had returned.
And Sunday afternoon the first hint of why I'd spontaneously fallen off the bike floated into my head: I remembered my feet slipping off the pedals and starting to lose control of the bike. It wasn't until a few days later that I put together why this would cause me to fall so badly, thanks to an observation of Jared's, of course-- the back-pedal braking that I described in my first post. At home I don't spontaneously fall off the English bike(s) at full speed because I have handle brakes so if something goes wrong I can slow down the bike with my hands and not impact the cement at 15km/hr. Aha.
Which brings us basically up to speed with today, since I have rather literally not been doing anything for a week. And now I think all this writing calls for a nap.
I've never had a blog before.
I'm not doing this correctly, since I've already been in Dresden for nearly three weeks and I'm not going to make much of an attempt to fill in. But for the past week I've been lying in bed with a neck brace, a cold cloth on my head, and a hideous-looking shoulder, playing poster child for bike helmet safety campaigns, and despite doctor's orders not to think for a week I've been reading other people's travel blogs and considering trying my hand at this slightly more objective and wider-audience writing. Jeff, another American on the same internship program here at TU Dresden, has set a wonderful precedent, which I'd recommend if you'd like some backstory, though I suppose I'm at least required to present my own side of this weekend's fun. The rest will come without proper introduction, more like one of those novels where you jump into the setting and you gather information about characters and places as you go. I always wanted to write one of those anyway.
But first,
An exposition on my love of bikes.
(I can do this. It's my blog. Muhaha.)
Last summer, as I'm sure everyone who would bother to read this blog knows, I spent five weeks in Darmstadt, Germany for a beginners' language class. I lived with a wonderful host family in the northern part of Darmstadt who presented me with a bike the minute I arrived at the house. I was delighted to discover I had not forgotten how to ride the thing in the six years since I'd last used my own, and after several weeks I was in love with bikes and bike transportation and convinced that I needed to continue this habit back at school in Athens.
This is relevant, I promise.
It was easier to buy a new one in Athens than transport the old one from Mandeville, so I waltzed into a bike shop downtown and asked the guy behind the counter if he knew where I could find a pretty vintage bike like that one that guy just brought in, and he just happened to have a gorgeous blue 35-yr-old English Triumph that he'd sell me for $50 if I didn't mind riding a single-speed. Since I grew up riding bikes in flat Louisiana I never really understood what multiple speeds were for, so I happily agreed, and bought it off him cash. Eventually I learned how to ride it up Athens' plentiful hills and thought myself pretty cool indeed.
AND SO when I arrived in Dresden I was determined to have a bike, a determination made necessity by the fact that the tram system is tragically not free for me since I am not a student this summer. I made a heartfelt effort at trying to find where I could buy a second-hand bike, in the process discovering this GDR-era line of bikes called Diamant. Jeff's mentor Reimund was able to give me advice on where to find old bikes and mentioned that he had an old one-speed Diamant in his basement that I could borrow for the summer-- exactly what I wanted. So last Wednesday Reimund fixed it up for me, lowered the seat, filled the tires, and I was set.
Making great strides with this Blogger program, after three tries I have inserted a picture of Bike into the blog at the appropriate place. An interesting perk of the fact that Bike was made during the GDR-era is that the fenders and the spokes are actually aluminum. Thankfully, Bike was designed to handle the rough roads found throughout Dresden. The best comparison I can use to describe this rattling indestructibility is that it gives one the sensation of driving a tank. From this angle you only barely see the misleading "Oh Shit" front brake handle on the right. It doesn't work. You have to rely entirely on the back brakes, which work by back-pedaling. This is important.
I rode Bike to work and around town the next two days, and then, convinced that Bike and I had reached some sort of peaceful mutual understanding, planned a bike trip with Jeff along the Elbe to Meissen. It was going to be epic, and it was, in all the wrong ways.
Saturday, absolutely the last notable thing I could write about
Dammit, I spent too long writing about Bike that I need to take a break because I've overclocked my brain. This is the problem with head injuries. So I'll leave it as a cliff-hanger for now, but just in case you're worried I'll give away the ending: Emily doesn't die, she just gets a concussion, has to take a week-long break from Life, and decides to start a blog.
That's Andrea sitting next to Jeff. Bet you can't guess which one's Navin.
