Bonjour Dresden!

This last week I didn’t do any travelling. Partially it was to give you, dear readers, a deeper and more incisive insight into life in a large and thriving German city, rather than producing just another travel based article, which is more or less what I and everyone else who writes for this blog seem to do every week. (Having said that though I think I wrote a particularly illuminating piece on Dresden’s public transport system a few weeks ago. I would heartily advise you to check it out…). Mostly however this new found recalcitrance was due to a number of more mundane reasons, generally speaking I was tired and running out of cash and I just wanted to settle down for a bit. In fact thinking of cash I now have the princely sum of 13 pounds left in the bank, fortunately my PhD guy is paying me cash in hand and there’s enough in my wallet to be going on with. If I get robbed though I’ll be living off pasta until he pays me again on Monday!

Anyway, enough of that, Dresden is cool, and Dresden had a Stadtfest going on all last weekend. I went on Friday and Saturday, but not Sunday, because I was generally burning through loads of money on things like overpriced beer, hotdogs, candyfloss, ferris-wheel rides, glühwein, dubious looking fried prawns on a stick, and at one stage €4 worth of shots in a shooting competition, which only won me a bottle of disgusting coca-cola, beer mix drink. Having said that I’d already seen away about 7 beers at the time, so how I managed to hit anything (or why I was even given an air-rifle in the first place) is quite beyond me!

In other news I also went to the DDR museum in Pirna. Pirna is just down the S-bahn from Dresden, but very much “the countryside” compared to Dresden. The inhabitants all seemed to have been taking a short rest crashing their tractors/livestock molestation, the entire town was full of NPD posters, no-one actually knew where the museum was except for a rather slow girl who pointed under a railway arch and said something unintelligible in Sächsisch, and finally a man I met in a pub after 20 minutes of searching (he was the only man in this particular pub who didn’t have a handlebar moustache!) In fact one old lady simply shouted “Nichts!” at me when I asked, so presumably she’d been screwed over by the Stasi at some point, or perhaps she simply didn’t like my face. Anyway when I finally got there (head out along the road coming away from the railway on the station side of the old town, left at the traffic lights, right about 50m after that and then 1km down the road opposite the sports centre/water park), it was completely empty, and so amazingly retro I wasn’t sure if it was cool or creepy (I think a bit of both). Lots of waxworks in pioneer uniforms/Vopo uniforms/ubiquitous flowery dresses, flowery curtains, flowery carpets. A room full of crap east German electrical goods which people across the Warsaw pact would probably have saved for years to buy. Trabis, Wurtzburgs, pictures of Honecker, propaganda posters, comemorative figurines and matchboxes and model Interflug planes. It is the last word in DDR kitsch and is spread over 2 slightly disconcerting floors – I’d strongly advise anyone in the area to go, particularly if the attendance is normally as low as when I was there, because it will probably go bust soon. No mention of the Stasi though, or any general bad stuff. I suppose Germany has been on the giving and receiving end of too much bad stuff to want to think about it all the time, maybe also the people running the museum are a bunch of nostalgia nutters.

Thinking of this while I was at the Stadtfest I was having a drunk conversation with a German guy (I’ve finally been adopted by a group of Germans – very exciting!) who was saying how beautiful the buildings along the river looked, at which point I said it was really terrible that we’d bombed it all, and flattened such a beautiful city for no reason. He just replied “Nee, das ist aber Geschichte” and changed the subject.