Dresden June 10-11

By Eric

I visited Dresden in 1983 (I was 17) during a group tour. We had had a poor lunch at a nondescript cold war era tourist restaurant after which we had about 30 minutes to explore the city. Some friends and I walked out of the restaurant and turned left and for 30 minutes saw nothing at all interesting. The luckier people had turned right and actually saw something. When we all got back on the bus they had stories of great cathedrals and half bombed-out buildings. This time I was going to see those things. And 16 years later, I figured, it would be even more restored.

We had heard and read only great things about Dresden. We had high expectations and as usual our high expectations resulted in disappointment.

At least we had no urban ring to worry about. The bike trail brought us right in. However, once we entered the city, we couldn't find a lively city center. We wandered around relatively empty city streets, surrounded by construction fences, looking for a "Marktplatz" or even just an "i" (information) sign. Our guidebook didn't have a map but it said the "theaterplatz" was sort of the center. We asked a man pushing a garbage can around and sweeping the sidewalks "Wo ist die theaterplatz?" ("Where is the theaterplatz?").

He was very friendly. "Ja, ja, die Altenstadt..." then he went on to describe how to get there.

"Nein, nicht altenstadt, Theaterplatz," we said.

"Ja, ja, altenstadt..." he described again how to get there.

It turns out the Theaterplatz is in the middle of the Altenstadt but we didn't know that.

Finally we ambled into a livelier part of the city. This was sort of a bland pedestrian mall, a little too wide in that Stalinist style and surrounded by fairly bland sometimes very ugly modern architecture. I remembered that I had had lunch on this plaza 16 years ago.

We stopped at the information center which had almost no information relevant to us at all. They didn't even have a phone book. We asked three questions: Where can we get internet access? Is there an Amex office in town? and Is there a UPS office in town (we wanted to ship some gifts)? The answer they gave us to the first question was wrong, and they didn't know the answer to the second two.

One of the great things about Dresden was the lack of tourists. There are relatively few and most are German. The down side of this, is that we had planned on a few tourist services we had grown to expect - no internet cafe, no AMEX office.

(Money Note: Using an ATM card to get money is by far the best way. No worry about exchange rates or commissions or opening hours. ATMs are everywhere in eastern Europe. However, our ATM cards had expired. We could get cash advances from VISA but this is very costly in the long run. Since Budapest, we had been buying travelers checks at Amex offices in the major cities, paying with personal checks which you can do if you hold an Amex card.)

We had a short debate and decided to get a hotel room. Accommodation has at times made a big difference in how we feel about a city. A bad night's sleep can really turn you against a place. So we got a very nice, modern room at a decent price by German standards. Though if you ever stay at the Ibis in Dresden, don't get the breakfast.

After taking showers and making dinner (pasta again) we explored the city by foot. This proved as awkward as exploring on touring bike had been. In WWII the city had been flattened worse than just about any other German city. In a few hours it was bombed so much that the damage was comparable to Hiroshima.

And they are still repairing it.

There was construction everywhere. Streets and whole city blocks were cutoff by fences. Some wide boulevards were strangely criss crossed with temporary fences like a maze. We entered one maze that ended at the entrance to some department store that had closed hours earlier so we had to backtrack about 200 yards.

There were certainly several impressive old buildings, very magnificent each one -- and huge. But they seemed to be haphazardly built here and there. None of them seem to be on the way to anywhere or near anything. A busy street cuts through the theatreplatz (we finally found it) and much of it seems to be a parking lot.

If we had come to Dresden early in our European tour we probably would have loved it. But after Prague, Wroclaw, Krakow, Kosice, and Budapest we had expectations of a cafe life, a pleasant city square, and great architecture everywhere, even if it is just reconstructions of destroyed buildings. But Dresden is perhaps more like Washington DC with great buildings here and there but lacking a center.

Also like DC, Dresden is supposed to have a lot of great museums. We visited none of them since we were burned out on museums. We had serious museum hangovers from France and Spain.

Our hotel had TV with an English language news channel, SkyNews from the U.K. which is just as redundant as CNN. We watched the peace deal in Kosovo unfold the next morning. It was so nice to just lie on our backs and catch up with the news. Checkout was noon. We left at about 11:55.

We had a tour of Dresden's back streets all afternoon as we tried to take care of a few errands like finding Amex to change our travelers checks and find an internet cafe. Dresden has neither of these. (We changed the checks at a bank for a large commission--a US$5 minimum for one transaction). Also we tried to find a UPS office to mail our gifts from. They have none, though we talked to a UPS truck driver who gave us a phone number we could use.

The streets were mostly cobblestone, which looks great, but riding on them was bouncy and slow moving. We liked them anyway. They reminded us of Budapest's and Pittsburgh's back streets -- large houses, big old trees, nice flower gardens.

We were on our way out of town when we came across the library. We decided to look inside on the off chance that they had internet terminals. They did! We managed to talk a woman into letting us use one for 30 minutes even though we didn't have a library card. However, the computer and the connection were so slow. In 30 minutes we managed to send only one message and read none at all.

The library was next to the new World Trade Center building. The main floor of this modern building is a shopping mall. But like the rest of Dresden, much of this was blocked off for construction. The mall did have a nice outdoor store though. They sold complete touring bikes, panniers, handlebar bag and all. It was hugely expensive: the whole setup was over US$2,000. They also had a huge section of bicycle touring books. In America you might find one book on bike touring. Here they had hundreds plus they had lots of bike maps. We bought one especially for the Elbe river route.

Next: Germany Chapter 3 - Bonn Banker and Bike Trail Hell

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