After a great start in Europe and 4 nights at Gabriele’s place, I was ready to make the first move in my trip. I couldn’t appreciate more of what my first CS host had offered to welcome me to this new continent. We set our reunion date to two and a half months later when I came back to Frankfurt. It was my first long train haul as well. The ICE train went from the modern West Germany to the historical East part, Dresden was the destination. The journey was covered by beautiful sceneries: windmills, farmlands, harvest. With the tunes accompanying from my iPod, I felt like a free soul. The world outside was full of actions and I was appreciative enough simply looking at it to enjoy the every second. 5 hours later, I arrived at Dresden Hauptbahnhof. I had to drag myself 1 km north of the train station through Prager Straße, the modern part of the city, to the nearest tourist office. It wasn’t that hard to locate my first hostel in Europe, Louise20, and it was a very clean one.
Dresden is the capital city of the State of Saxony in Eastern Germany, very close to the boarder with Czech Republic. Because the city is located on River Elbe and was the home for collections of baroque masterpieces, it is well-known as “The Florence on the Elbe”. The city was full of history, both in the ancient time and the modern Germany. (I learned more of it when I came to Berlin a few days later - Dresden played a big part in the revolution that led to the falling of the Wall.) It was also a place of artistic gems. Unfortunately, this was changed in a controversial Allied bombing shortly before the end of the WWII, which destroyed 90% of the city and left the elegant central area as rubbles. (The amount of bombs the Allied used in the three-day bombing was almost one per two Dresden population that time.) The flattened place was rebuilt after the war, in almost exactly the style, model, and location as it was like before. I usually don’t like replicas of anything, but this town attracted me in no other fake structures could. The buildings are uniqued decorated, the history was irreplaceable, and the skyline view from the River Elbe cannot be justified by words. One trivia of the place is Dresden had no subways due to its geological ground feature, so the tram systems played a big part in their public transportation. Some of the trams were the longest in record, and they ran on railways built in grass to reduce noises.
I settled down in the hostel and met my only roommate that night (in a 5-person room): Caymin, a very cool gal from Californian. She’s a climber, a surfer; oh well, let’s just say a West Coaster. And she just came from hiking around the Bastei area, where she stayed in a cave in the rain the night before -- what a trooper! She told me that area was where the crazy Europeans first started “free climbing”. That instantly brought me back to the film I saw at the Mountain Film festivals in Vancouver earlier this year - yeah, those outrageous “suicides”. Caymin and I decided to have some drinks together after she used the internet. I took the time to have a short stroll to the river bank. I passed by the two fountains at Abertplatz, and walked through the tree-covered pedestrian Hauptstraße. On Augustusbrücke, I had my first taste of the skyline of Dresden over River Elbe. After meeting Caymin back in the hostel, we went to a pub called Katy’s Garage. It turned out to be a pretty cool place. We had a couple of drinks under the tent outside before going in. The music was nice and we even played a couple of fusball games - I’d rather play real soccer, as it proved again that I sucked at this game. After coming out of the pub, we went on looking for more drinks but end up exploring the Neustadt at night. The more we walked into it, the more we found Dresden was such a diverse place with unique pubs, art galleries, and shops. We went back earlier than we wanted and went to sleep without knowing a shocking news would strike us the first thing the next morning.
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