Dresden, Germany - en route to Prague
Trip Start
Jun 01, 2005
1
12
Trip End
Jul 22, 2005
Dresden,
Germany
Friday, June 17, 2005
I'm sorry it's taken so long to make this first entry. A ton of stuff has happened since I've arrived and there's just been no time to stop and catch our breath.
On Monday, I arrived in London at about 8am. After the usual pleasantries at Heathrow (i.e. being interrogated), I grabbed the tube into the city. I'm glad I ended up having this respite between flights. I have been flying so much, it was just nice to have my feet touch the ground and get some fresh hour. It was a one hour ride into central London, which left me super early for lunch with my friend Cindy (who I went to Hopkins with). I got off a few stations early to walk for a bit, since I had plenty of time. A word of advice - London tube stations are further apart than they might appear. I walked around St. James Park and then past Buckingham Palace. The queen is doing fine, in case you were wondering. Then I proceeding along the Thames to meet Cindy for lunch by the Tower Bridge. Along the way, I pondered the age old question - do business people in London wear any shoes that aren't black. In case you were wondering, Em, they occasionally do ,-). I had lunch with Cindy along the river, which was nice. I don't think we'd seen each other since I first moved to Berkeley. I'm looking forward to spending more time with her and in London on the way back to the states.
I finally arrived in Berlin on Monday night around 6pm. Jody was waiting for me at the gate and we hopped in a cab to head to my friend Nadeem's place. He is doing a fellowship in Germany for a year and had only arrived in Berlin a few days prior. His girlfriend Michelle, another fried and classmate from Haas, was also there. Given that Jody and I were very tired and I could only bear Jody's stories about the trials and tribulations of flying business class for so long, we just grabbed dinner at a local restaurant and went straight to bed. Incidentally, the waiter at dinner thought we must either be Canadian or British, since we were so polite.
Nadeem lives in an area of Berlin that in the midst of being gentrified. While it had historically been part of West Berlin, the area was close to the wall and therefore had been somewhat rundown and populated mostly by immigrants.
So our first real day in Berlin was kind of a whirlwind. It turns out Nadeem's mom is originally from Germany and teaches German in Wisconsin. She had taken a group of Catholic high school girls on exchange for three weeks, so we joined her on her tour of Berlin. Let me first say, Kathy was an awesome tour guide. She also walked really fast and made sure we saw as much as anyone ever has in one day. We saw Alexander platz (the main avenue in old East Berlin), the Red Town Hall, the two oldest churches in Berlin, the Cathedral, the largest synagogue, the museum island, the TV tower (a really ugly tower built by the communists), old tenaments that had been yuppified, and Jewish cemetary where only one tombstone now remains. That was all before lunch! We then saw an old department store that had been occupied by squatters and turned into an artistic community. It was a little disappointing, though, when we went inside and saw people using computers. After that, she put the girls on the U-Bahn (subway) and decided we needed to see more. We went to see the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag (the German Parliament with an awesome view from the top), the new Holocaust museum, and Unter den Linden (a famous boulevard). We then met up with Nadeem (who had been in German class all day) and went to see Checkpoint Charlie and the remnants of the Wall that are still standing. You're probably getting as tired of reading this as we were by the end of the day. We walked over to Potsdammer Platz next, which was a big square pre-war and was cut in half when the wall was put up. Now it's become a giant mall/office complex. We were basically heading there for something to eat, but got sidetracked when we saw a red carpet as people headed to the premier of the new Batman movie. We saw Katie Holmes, who had apparently just gotten engaged to Tom Cruise, and after hanging out there for a while finally grabbed some dinner and called it a night!
After all that craziness, yesterday was bound to be a little more tame. We rose a bit later and probably made it out of the house by noon. We headed to see a church that had been bombed out during WW2. The church was a little overrun with gift shops and vendors, but was still cool to see. The new church they had built next door was really cool, though with the blue stained glass coming from Chartres in France. We grabbed lunch after the church before trying to find an unmarked synagogue that was closed. We headed back accross town to see the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. It was definitely really cool. There were so many cool stories about families separated by the wall and all of these crazy escape attempts. One story involved a group of seniors. When one of their friends said they couldn't dig a tunnel, they made it twice as big and all escaped. Another story had east german guards jumping out the window of the watch tower and running accross...so they had to make the windows smaller. I would definitely recommend checking this place out if you're ever in Berlin. We then headed over to the Pergammom (their version of the British museum - all the things they-ve stolen from other countries) and saw the entry way to a Greek temple that was almost 2000 years old. We went to dinner after this in a supposedly hip area of Berlin, only to find out that Germans don't really do the late dinner thing like other Europeans and that they don't really go to bars on Thursday nights. We had a great time, nonetheless. We even managed to find good sushi.
That brings us today. Jody and I caught a 9:30 train to Dresden. We had a little confusion over where we were supposed to sit, but when we started yelling at each other, a German man who spoke English was kind enough to intervene and help out. We quickly discovered that we sitting on the party car. Despite the fact that it was before 10, we were still the only people who didn't have a beer in our hands. After mistaking us for English people, we told the Germans that we were actually from San Fran. They thought this was cool, but then I told them that Jody was actually from Texas and they started to make fun of her. One of the Germans who had lived in Miami for a while took an interest and started forcing us to do pre-packaged shots with him. They then regailed us with loud, drunken singing of American tunes with German words for the remainder of the journey. We arrived in Dresden around noon and found it to be a nice and much quieter than Berlin. Dresden had been a culture center prior to World War 2, but was completely leveled by allied carpet bombers. Since the reunification, a lot of work has been done to rebuild the original town. We walked around for a few hours, but eventually decided we'd had enough and came to do some Internet. The town is really cute and I'm definitely glad we stopped. There's still a lot of constrution, but they have already done an amazing job rebuilding. The Opera House along the Elbe was particularly beautiful and we climbed one of the church towers for an aerial view. It's weird to see all of these beautiful old buildings with boring and ugly communist architecture in the background. In Berlin, as well, you just hope they keep tearing down the communist buildings, which they seem to be doing as quickly as possible. They are definitely an eyesore. We'll meet up with Nadeem and Michelle in a few hours and hop on the train with them to Prague.
Sorry if this was a lot to take in all at once. Drop me an email at panzer@mba.berkeley.edu if you get the chance.
Marc
