Today I woke up to a view of grey skies, crow-filled fields and a curled-up cat at the foot of my bed. A journey into town involved driving on the left side of the road, and I paid for my new socks in pounds rather than euros. I’m not in Berlin any more; I won’t be coming back for a long time.
This year abroad has been such an exhausting, exciting, intense series of events that there’s no point even trying to summarise or qualify it. It was what it was, I had a huge amount of fun but it wasn’t always easy and got pretty black in parts. It was ten months in the most electric city in Europe and I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done. Drooling infants and all.
But since I don’t want this post to be a squelchy emotional snooze-fest I’m not going to write about good times and reminiscences but rather simply write about my last week in Deutschland, a week that in itself was pretty hard to sum up in anything less than a multimedia powerpoint presentation; nonetheless, since we all hate WordArt and text effects I’ll just have to give it a try.
For my last week before coming home I wanted to do something new and see a part of Germany I’ve never seen before, and so I arranged a whistle-stop tour of the Sachsen area, calling at Dresden and Leipzig with a brief stop in Halle. I arrived in Dresden Hauptbahnhof on Monday morning after a long and drab train journey and grinned gormlessly with excitement during the tram ride to my bed for the following two nights, a futon belonging to a friend who kindly let me kip in his pad while I was there. He gave me a map, a tourist guide, a list of things to visit and (with optimistic trust I might not expect from friends who know my clumsy, forgetful and ultimately useless self a little better) a key, then he set off to his job in Berlin leaving me to begin my adventure. I divided my time in Dresden into two parts of the city for two days of exploration; the southern part below the river (Altstadt) for the first day and the part north of the river (Neustadt) for the second.
Dresden’s Altstadt is rather hard to explain. The tourist guide I had claimed that the nucleus of the Altstadt was the old market, which I set as my starting point, but I was amazed to find that when I reched the old market what I actually found was a colossal concreted empty void, surrounded by buildings but featuring nothing within the square except for a ramp to some underground toilets. It’s honestly incredible how large and pointless the Old Market square actually is; nonetheless, all the old and famous buildings one has to see in Dresden do orbit around it so it functions as a sort of black hole, keeping all the parts of Dresden in its pull whilst itself being nothing but a dead emptiness. In the Altstadt surrounding the square the tourists swarm around the major sights, these being mainly pompous old buildings like the Frauenkirche, the Kreuzkirche, the Semperoper and the world’s longest porcelain mural (which makes me wonder how I’ve managed to miss this ‘who’s-got-the-longest-porcelain-mural’ competition all this time). Everything got viciously bombed in the war and has since been renovated and rebuilt, which is why it all looks simultaneously old and beautiful but also brand new. The Frauenkirche, for example, is a startlingly golden monolith of a building, having been lovingly reconstructed in Dresden’s traditional sandstone and only just reopened in the last three or so years. The inside is spectacular and marvellously kitsch; it’s all powder-puff colours, pinks and greens and painted-on faux marble and featuring as the focal point an incredible altar piece. This huge sculpture behind the altar is of a bunch of flowery pastel biblical guys holding shining golden bunches of grapes or crucifixes, all wading among huge bulks of pure white fluffy clouds. It’s like DisneyBaby® Does The New Testament, and it’s weird but pretty, I suppose.
Beyond the Frauenkirche, however, Dresden’s Altstadt is a rather oppressive place. All the other famous buildings are made of the same sandstone but due to their age and the remarkable porousness of the sandstone they have sucked up every molecule of smog in the air, causing them to turn an ominous and deep black colour. They are so vast and gothic that they honestly do loom over you in an impressive-yet-threatening kind of way, and I found myself getting ever more frustrated by the combination of the unfriendly buildings and the outrageously expensive cafés and restaurants us tourists had to content ourselves with. I was worried that Dresden would be a disaster.
But then the second day changed everything. Evidently the river Elbe is not just a body of water but also a force field separating the forces of dark and light within the city like a Japanese myth. The minute one crosses the river (and after a good hearty walk) one reaches the Neustadt and is met with any number of colourful and vibrant streets full of interesting things to do and see. I spent almost the whole day there, heading eastwards in the afternoon to see the sunset over the heart-wrenchingly beautiful vineyards in the river valley before dinner. After a bowl of the kind of soup that makes me want to passionately ravish whoever the heck cooked it, I head over to an odd little open-air theatre that I had stumbled upon on my wanderings, coaxed in by the fact that they had lampshades hanging everywhere like fruits.
One buys a ‘Dreierticket’ and can then see three of a selection of half-hour mini plays and performances which take place in all kinds of weird little stage-come-sheds littered around the location. I was aggressively bellowed into watching a bizarre cabaret/circus-style amateur play with my first ticket, which I regretted the minute one of the cast members went ‘offstage’ (read: retreated behind a pinned-up bedsheet) and was wheeled in seconds later, lying on a tableclothed gurney, surrounded by salad leaves, completely naked. With the other cast members playing his buttocks like drums.
I stuck to comedy for the rest of the night. A huge mass of us queued for something called ‘Die Echse’, which I knew nothing about except for the fact that it was the most popular performance on offer and the man in charge of tickets was wearing a fez. It turned out to be the most hilarious half-hour of an incredibly sharp and witty comedian whose trick is to metamorphose into a lizard puppet with a cigar and a strong Sachsisch dialect, talking about how he and Aristotle founded the first ever theatre back in prehistory. Also, he did a brief warm-up act involving two sheep arguing about their right to ‘baa’. It was brilliant. The last act was a creepy John Waters lookalike with a drawn-on pencil moustache who had been brought in as a last-minute replacement for someone else who was ill and did a stand-up routine of unrelated small and bizarre acts. He took a lightsaber out of a suitcase and did a few swooshes with it, then used it to pick his teeth. He stood at the back of the stage with his hands out, completely motionless, then very slowly curled over the fingers of his left hand and then finally announced that that was his impression of ‘a wallpaper’. He had a children’s book about wildlife propped on a music stand and picked it up to show us a photo of a tiger licking some soil. It took a while for the penny to drop but as he carried on it just got more and more hilarious until we ended up baying for two whole encores which he sheepishly consented to perform for us. The crazy genius.
I’ll tell you all about Leipzig tomorrow children, as the delicious smells of Dinner At Home are calling me from downstairs. And after tomorrow…well, it’s time to start thinking about finally putting this old dog to sleep.
