Part 10: Where has all the Hochwasser gone?

The end of my self-imposed assignment is in sight -- only four days to go after this one and we'll be safely back in Boston. For those of you who might look at this subject line in despair and say, what, not another longwinded piece of blather, please let me know that you don't want to get any more. For those of you who have actually been enjoying this trek, I'm sorry it's taking so long. But of course I wouldn't want to keep you up past your bedtime reading the whole thing at once, either, so...

One clarification from "yesterday's" installment about Leipzig: the tunnel whose construction is disrupting the middle of the city is not for the streetcars, but for a railway connection between the Hauptbahnhof (Bostonians, think "North Station") and the Bayerischer Bahnhof ("South Station"). Something that has been in conception and planning since 1914, interrupted of course by any number of crises and obstacles that we can all remember, it is now finally underway and is planned to open in 2009. Unlike the still stalled tunnel between North and South Stations in Boston, which was to have only one extra station, this one has three extra stations in the less than two-mile distance that are now under construction, plus the ones at either end by the main railway stations.

I don't know what it will take for Boston to get around to building its own much-needed equivalent. Interested people can Google "City-Tunnel Leipzig" to get lots more information -- either in German, or in the hilarious language that is automatic computer translation into "English."

But Friday 8 August saw us in a taxi to the Weimar Hauptbahnhof. I had warned our hostess in Pirna that we might be coming late, in which case I would of course give her a call. But the train ride took less than three hours, although we passed through Leipzig (again) and a long stretch of flat, midwestern-looking farmland in the Saxon countryside before reaching the outskirts of Meissen (visible across the fields) and Dresden, where we needed to change trains.

The Hauptbahnhof in Dresden was far from the grand spectacle at Leipzig: one expected to see a city still being rebuilt from its total destruction in 1944, but the railway station itself is in the middle of major construction. Again I was reminded of Boston: North Station; the demolition of the Garden to be replaced by, yuck, the Fleet Center, and the elevated Central Artery, and the notorious Big Dig. Is the whole world under construction? Well, yes, I guess. (And the evening and the morning were the gazillionth day...)

We found the Regionalbahn to Schöna and travelled along the Elbe only about 20 minutes from Dresden to Pirna, and we began to notice what the newspapers had been talking about but which we had not really seen with our own eyes: the worst drought Europe has known in decades, maybe even centuries. The bits of the Main and the Kinzig and the Fulda that we had seen were nothing like the astonishing front-page photo of the Rhine at Düsseldorf, with nothing but pebbles for hundreds of feet.
But now we saw what is normally the broadest of the rivers on the itinerary we were following, and indeed, the Elbe had barely enough water between its stretches of stony banks to float the excursion boats -- Mississippi-sized steamers -- which are an important part of the region's tourism industry. What makes that so remarkable is that exactly one year before we were there, the rains began that raised the Elbe, and all the major rivers in Germany, to their highest flood level in a thousand years. (Or at least it is called a "thousand-year flood," which doesn't mean exactly what I just said, but it's close enough.)

We arrived in the pleasant little river city of Pirna, which has a long history of its own and a character rivalling that of nearby Dresden, albeit on a smaller scale. That statement can be supported by the fact that a painter from Venice named Bernardo Bellotto lived in Dresden for a number of years, but also in Pirna, and his paintings of both cities are still prized possessions of the Zwinger museum. Further, his paintings of Dresden were, like all his paintings, so carefully detailed and accurate that they were used after the conflagration as guides to the restoration of the treasured buildings of the Baroque Jewel of Saxony.

Pirna did not suffer great destruction, and the Marktplatz that was a favorite subject of Bellotto's (with a house called the Canaletto house, although it is not known that he actually lived there) is still (or has been restored to) a most pleasing vista. Canaletto, you say? The famous Canaletto? Well, this is the other Canaletto. Bellotto was the nephew of Antonio Canal, famous painter of detailed views of Venice, from whom he learned his technique -- and both painters were called Canaletto.

Our hotel in Pirna, as it happens, is called the Hotel Bernardo Bellotto. I had tried to book the hotel that advertises itself as "direkt am Bahnhof" -- and so it is. But I also named three others that looked to be within reasonable distance of the station, and it was the vivacious Judith Fichtner from the Bernardo Bellotto who had space available. I had tried so hard to work out the walking route from the station to the hotel, from the online city maps I pulled, but it seemed complicated, and Jay insisted we shall take a taxi. It was good we did -- the distance was farther than I had hoped, and the route was as complicated as it looked on the map.

It was still miserably hot. In fact, this day, the 8th of August 2003, saw the hottest temperature ever recorded in Germany: 105 degrees F. Although that was in a place far to the west of where we were, nevertheless we weren't far from that mark. Our hotel room, on the "first floor" (which in the U.S. would be the second floor), was reached by a stairway that had, 2/3 of the way up, a mark on the wall showing how high the "Hochwasser" from a year before had reached. Our hotel room was also very very tiny -- fortunately it had a good-sized bathroom, almost as large as the long, narrow bedroom where the two beds were placed end to end, with about a foot between them and the desk and wardrobe.

For some odd reason, the town was jampacked with tourists. Okay; we were reaping the results of scheduling a trip at the time when all of Europe is on holiday, and we were in one of the most popular tourist destinations of Germany (for the Germans, at any rate). Our hotel also lacked a restaurant, so we had to go out in search of food. We were only a block or two from every restaurant and hotel in the middle of Pirna, so there was much from which to choose, but we found an Italian place that offered human-size portions of very tasty northern Italian food, in contrast to the gargantuan servings so many German restaurants had been setting before us. All the restaurants had tables on the sidewalk -- because of course none were air-conditioned -- and while it was hot out there, it was even hotter inside.

I was very much anticipating the next day's trip to Dresden, so we went to the tourist office, located in the "Canaletto House," and purchased maps, and an International Herald Tribune (my brain was weary from trying to translate German newspapers), and found out: (1) no, there is nothing resembling a laundromat in Pirna; one would have to take the train into Dresden for that -- and there is not even a laundry that would do the wash for us, and (2) there is an internet cafe!
So after we had eaten, and Jay went back to the hotel to flake out, I found the internet cafe and was finally able to access my Juno account on webmail and clean out the ton of spam that had accumulated in it since Eisenach (where, I failed to report to you, I had also made the first use in my life of an internet cafe). However, the "cafe" offered no refreshment, was hot, dark, and extremely noisy because its clientele were local geeks and hackers in their late teens and early 20s who were busy playing games with each other and, no doubt, guys just like them in Brisbane and Mumbai and Dar-es-Salaam. And being very exuberant about it all. So that, along with the unfamiliar German keyboard, made it very difficult to concentrate, and after a couple of futile attempts to compose a rational message or two, I gave up, went back to the hotel, and decided to get some sleep -- after I had used a tube of laundry detergent to wash out some increasingly rank pieces of cloth.

Ha. It turned out that our tiny room opened on to a narrow, cobblestoned street lined with buildings on both sides such that it provided amplification for every sound made on that street. And that was the night some kids a couple of doors down decided to have a party. Germans, when they party, do it with great energy. Someone also had a large dog which at various times during the night took umbrage at the proceedings, and protested very loudly. Twice, after the noise had reached yet another peak, I looked out the window to find that there were three or four police cars just below our window. The noise did not even end with daybreak, because that's when all the city's domestic housekeeping began, with vehicle after vehicle rolling over the cobblestones and opening and shutting its doors and revving up its motor to peel out and make room for the next one.

I consider that tortuous night to have caused the episode of GRARS that set in the next day or two, and made the rest of the trip a lot more uncomfortable than it needed to be. That is, being interpreted: Garber's Recurrent Acute Respiratory Syndrome -- an ailment that has afflicted me periodically since childhood, as can be demonstrated by my sixth-grade school picture, where my left eye is watering and I am looking most unhappy.

Still -- I was really looking forward to Dresden.

[composed Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 00:28:06 -04]