Part 11: Whatever possessed me to choose an August Saturday to visit Dresden?

On Saturday, 9 August 2003, we sternly ordered our eyes to stay open even though they wanted desperately to make up for the lost sleep from the night before. This was the day I had been looking forward to for the whole trip! Long ago I dreamed of visiting the four great Baroque cities of Mitteleuropa: Budapest, Prague, Cracow, and Dresden. This would be the first of those four, and I was still hoping to squeeze Prague in on this trip somehow.

The day didn't start well when I couldn't find the maps and the International Herald Tribune I had purchased the day before at the Pirna Tourist Office. But we walked along the Langen Strasse to the train station -- where I observed that there are great opportunities for anyone who likes to restore old buildings. The main business streets to the south are beautifully restored for the most part; on this street the ravages of the Communist era have not yet been reversed. Most buildings appeared largely vacant; the ones that were occupied cried out for TLC, but they still had an underlying architectural appeal and appeared structurally sound. I suggest that entrepreneurs reading this might wish to go there and install a laundromat or two and an internet café somewhere along here!

The Green Guide's map of Dresden made it look quite straightforward to get to the historic centre from the Hauptbahnhof -- just go out the front and continue straight along the Pragerstrasse. And the Tourist Information Center was indicated just a block or so away, so I could at least replace the maps I had mislaid.

We walked. And came to no street sign identifying the street we were on, and came to no tourist info place and to nothing that looked like we were heading toward the center of town. When a street sign finally appeared, behold, we were not on the Pragerstrasse at all, but on something called the St. Petersburger Strasse, which went nowhere near where I wanted to go.

We turned left as soon as it was possible, and when we finally did reach the Pragerstrasse we were already several blocks past the info office, and it was already far too hot to think of retracing our steps. My mistake, it turned out later, was to have been looking for an actual street. Leaving the train station, the Pragerstrasse actually goes through a kind of enclosed passageway through a construction area, and the sign pointing to it means the passageway, not the adjacent street. Oh well.

We did get to the Altmarkt, which didn't look at all "Alt" -- just another modern commercial plaza. I had kept telling Jay he was really going to like Dresden, and so far there just wasn't all that much to look at that was appealing. As the description of Dresden at skyscrapers.com accurately puts it, "the loss of the Baroque 'Bausubstanz' of this once exquisitely beautiful city is an immensely sad and irretrievable consequence of a terrible war."

Even when we got to the triangular intersection where, according to the Green Guide map and my visualization of the place, we should have begun to see the splendors of this city, it still was not at all apparent that the building lurking over there to our left was going to be a major destination. But, swallowing my disillusionment, we passed through the gateway, and suddenly there it was: the inner courtyard of the Zwinger, the pleasure palace of the dukes of Saxony. And indeed, as someone once said of it (adapted by my faulty memory): it takes the Baroque sensibility about as far as it is possible to go without tipping over into really bad taste. But it stops short of that tipping point, and simply provides a breathtaking visual experience.

It was August in Germany. It was Saturday in Dresden. That combination meant that all the Germans from more prosaic places like Berlin and Hannover and Frankfurt were on holiday, and a significant percentage of them were in Dresden. Right here in the courtyard of the Zwinger. I noted with some interest that a performance of some sort was scheduled later in the afternoon, but I wanted to get right to the art gallery, and especially to the Canaletto vedute -- the detailed townscape paintings of Dresden and Pirna.

It did seem a good idea to purchase the combination ticket, giving entry to all the museums in town for a day. I had not studied the plan of the galleries carefully enough, and the color scheme of the walls -- red for Italian, green for Dutch and Flemish, and gray for Spanish and French, was somehow just not intuitive enough to grasp on such a hot day, so I'm afraid we wandered rather aimlessly. The Italian hallways we were in showed little sign of Canaletto Bellotto, and before long the need for sustenance -- preferably liquid and cold -- asserted itself, so we found the cafe. There the service was so poor -- the staff were suffering from the un-air-conditioned heat as much as the patrons -- that we got no liquid at all, and finally we just gave up in despair, paid the bill for a piece of cake, and left.

By the time we did find the Canaletto vedute I was weary of the indoors and eager to see the rest of the city, which had beckoned to us from outside the museum cafe. We did stop at the museum shop to purchase some things to look at in preparation for the *next* time we come to Dresden; of special interest to me was a book of photographs of the ruins of 1945 after the fire-bombing, while a book of the Canalettos has given lots of plasure since we've been home.

When we got into the Theaterplatz, there we were, at last, in Dresden! The mighty Semper Opera House to the left, the Castle-Residence and the Catholic cathedral to the right, suddenly Baroque splendor was all around us in a stupefying ensemble, and our cameras got very busy. We were drawn onward along the wall of the castle on which there is an enormous mosaic portraying the dukes and kings of the house of Saxe-Wettin, from earliest times to the beginning of the 20th century.

Emerging into the Neumarkt, we found ourselves in a kind of regal Disneyworld -- I raised my camera to photograph a barrel-organ player, who promptly obscured his face with a card commanding: "Zuerst ein Euro." I delightedly snapped the card, paid the Euro, and then snapped his determinedly jolly face.

Our sympathies were aroused by several mimes, encased in silver paint and stiff silver costumes -- perhaps as chess pieces? -- who must have been suffering terribly in the heat. Some rather strained diversions were present in the form of a rickshaw (in this heat??) and a Trabi, decked out to advertise the Trabi-safari you could take in it. The Trabi, for those who might not know, was the notorious East German two-cylinder car that put-putted its way around the highways from Pomerania to Thuringia during the 40 years of Communist rule. A few Trabis can still be seen serving as utilitarian transport, but it seems to have become a favorite joke to have made it a tourist attraction (even in Pirna there was a poster at the Bahnhof advertising a Trabi-fest for one evening that weekend).

I thought I was leading us toward the Albertinum, where we would make further use of our general-admission ticket (a swift in-and-out of the Johanneum did not entice -- yet another carriage museum). We climbed the stairs to a majestic building and showed our tickets to the person at the desk, who informed us that they would not admit us to this exhibition. Shades of Leipzig, I thought. But I decided *not* to pay any extra money, and only when we left did I read the signs to learn that we were not in the Albertinum at all, but at the University, and the exhibition was of student work and therefore not part of the cultural consortium.

Weary, we were drawn toward the shade trees on the bank overlooking the Elbe, where we sat and rested for a while -- and were again awed by the ravages of the drought. A few steamships hugged the gravelled edges of the desultory stream far below -- they themselves seemed to be sweating.

Finally we did get to the actual Albertinum (having noticed that the University building itself is quite splendid, and in just about any other city would constitute an important attraction, but it is hardly mentioned in the guidebooks). The paintings from the late-Romantic to the Expressionists reside in my memory as heavily impressive -- much too heavy for enjoyment on a day that was crying out for lemon sorbet. We need to go back, not only for those paintings, but for the famous Green Vault, where apparently much bejewelled treasure is displayed. We never even got to its entrance, which to people who have done Dresden properly must seem almost blasphemy.

But on that day we had had it. We went back to the Bahnhof, passing by the obligatory churches (the Kreuzkirche and the under-restoration Frauenkirche), but mainly looking for as many shaded arcades as we could find to get out of the blazing sun. Quite unlike the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, the one at Dresden is not inviting at all, being under construction and, by comparison, rather laughably small. We did stop in at the Reisebüro to see about booking sleeper tickets back to Frankfurt -- perhaps by way of Prague? Well, it turned out that the night train from Prague to Frankfurt would have required four changes of train, which rather negated the purpose of taking a sleeper, so instead we booked a one-day round-trip to Prague for Monday, and a sleeper from Dresden Neustadt to Frankfurt for Tuesday. The ticket seemed to say something about second class, which I complained about, but the agent said that was all there was. We then gladly boarded our little local train to Pirna, where at least the buildings on the streets were not so far apart that one could not find shade.

En route to the Hotel Bernardo Bellotto, we suddenly heard sounds of music from far, far above. We looked high up, to the church tower, and there was a brass choir playing. I rejoiced in the zoom capacities of my camera, and again was wishing I had bothered to learn how to turn on its sound-recording function. But it was a marvelously uplifting antidote to what had been a day of mostly frustrated expectations. We arrived at the hotel, tired but a bit happier, and much anticipating a good night's rest -- to be informed with enthusiasm by our hostess that we had chosen to be in Pirna on the weekend of its annual Courtyard Festival. That's why the hotels were all booked, and why the streets and cafes had been so swarming with people. All the mansions and hotels of the city that had courtyards (and there were many of them -- almost a Saxon Seville) threw them open for the evening and served beer and wine and folk music and karaoke and whatever the hosts could think of.

Sigh. So much for our restful night -- our room was, after all, only a floor above all the festivities that were swirling for blocks around. So we did take a walk in the blessedly falling dusk, and occasionally felt what posed as a breeze, and in our (at least my -- I can't really speak for Jay) exhaustion did our best to affirm the pleasures that many people were having in this really very pleasant little town.

Next day was going to be completely different. We were going into the countryside -- to the Sächsische Schweiz, the "Switzerland of Saxony,"where the Sandstone Mountains were waiting to entertain and awe us. So we slept as best we could.

[composed Sat, 15 Nov 2003 22:48:18 -0500]