I will have to write this email as quickly as I can, as I have already used up a little over half of my allotted internet access for the day. At this hostel, the worst in which I have stayed since I was in Nuremberg, one gets one solid three-hour block of internet use per day, after which one has to pay. It is kind of funny to complain about this - I feel a little like a 12-year-old boy complaining that he only has fifty text messages per day - but I find limits on internet use discommodious and restrictive. That being said, I will try to write this before my time runs out. Due to technical difficulties, I will not be able to post this email on my blog, but such is life: there is no beating computers.
I escaped from the Czech Republic today. The train ride out of the country was better than any that I had had over the past two weeks for three chief reasons: it was not in a Czech train, it was taking me away from the Czech Republic, and it led me past more interesting landscapes than I had seen in ages. At first, we passed villages with impressive churches surrounded, naturally, by buildings with caved-in roofs and half-collapsed walls. These gave way to villages that were far too clean, orderly, and well-maintained to have anything to do with the Czech Republic, and those villages, in turn, gave way to spectacular rock formations, wooded hills, and even a couple of castles. As we approached Dresden, the conductor said a whole bunch of stuff in German and added, in English, that we would be arriving in Dresden in a few minutes (by which he meant something like twenty-five minutes). The train itself, despite being air-conditioned, was still afflicted by its passage through the Czech Republic. It left Prague ten minutes late and grew about five minutes later with every stop: at every new city in the Czech Republic, a new announcement was made, in which the conductor apologized for the train's lateness and added five or so more minutes to it until we left the Czech Republic. At that point, the announcements stopped, and one can only presume that the train kept closer to its schedule.
I was ineffably relieved as soon as I stepped off the train in Dresden. While my Google map's directions were, as usual, wildly incorrect about the way from the train station to my hostel, I had reentered civilization. I was once again in a city with trees, parks, and ornate plazas. There were real street signs, like in North America; the streets were not littered with garbage and cigarette butts; buildings were not covered in graffiti or missing siding; some buildings looked like they had been built within the last two hundred years; and the air, while thick with cigarette smoke and exhaust from cars, was so much cleaner than in the Czech Republic that one wanted to breathe it in with one's entire body in giant gulps. People did not scowl at me when I passed them; people working in the service industry were happy to chat with me; and one man, a little later in the evening, asked me if I needed help and explained which monuments in the city center would still be open for viewing when he saw me looking confused and staring at my map. If Eastern Germany is poorer than Western Germany, it is still a hundred times more affluent and pleasant than the Czech Republic, and my return to it was like a return to life.
My first order of business was, naturally, to find my hostel. I knew where it was thanks to a map in the train station - Dresden has maps everywhere, another difference between it and Prague. There is a little city map every hundred or two hundred meters in Dresden's city center, while one would be lucky to find one or two of them in the whole of Prague. As I walked towards my hostel, I marveled at the liveliness of the people around me and the level of upkeep of the buildings to my left and right. Dresden has a great many very new buildings, from banks to shopping malls, and even has bookstores, unlike Prague. I ducked into the first bakery that I saw after passing far enough away from the train station to get low-quality food for too much money, and I was surprised at the cheapness of everything there. The bakery reminded me both how tasty German pastries are and how I do not actually want to have them every day, as one eventually gets tired of them, like anything else; one comes to crave healthier food, as odd as that might sound. When I found the cross street leading up to my hostel, I saw the word "hostel" written in spray paint on the side of a nearby, midget-like building that looked like a rundown schoolroom. In another minute or two, I was at the foot of my hostel in Dresden.
I suppose that I should not spend too much time describing the hostel in which I am staying: while it colors my impressions of Dresden and offsets my experience a little, it does not reflect any intrinsic features of Dresden, as far as I know. The hostel owner could not tell me anything useful about the city; she gave me the worst city map that I have seen on this entire trip; she led me to a stuffy room with lockers that require one to bring one's own lock (which I have done, by dint of having bought one perforce at a similar hostel that I visited, perhaps a month ago); she told me that breakfast, if I wanted it, would cost 5 Euros; and so on. This is not a hostel in which people interact with one another. It has limited internet access. It has a very uncomfortable common room. While it is a pity to have to spend three days here, things could be a lot worse: one has sometimes to remind oneself that other people get up at 6:00 or 7:00 AM each day to work nine-to-five jobs, while I am in Europe. Many such people would happily trade places with me and stay in a lousy hostel for three days in order to escape their jobs.
When I left my hostel to explore the city (that is, after I bought a goodly amount of groceries for only 10 Euros - enough for three breakfasts and lunches), I had one of my best experiences of the entire trip. Dresden is a city of stupefying beauty, a city through which one walks with mouth agape - it is a city of royalty. One does not know where to begin with the rebuilt city center. In fact, since I broke off writing this email yesterday, I will begin with the comment that I do not really want to finish it; that is, I do not want to put a lot of work into making it look nicer. If I had managed to present my observations in a logical order, rather than slapping them together like bits of dough that will not stick, then you would have a coherent picture of what I experienced; alas, I was unfocussed when I wrote yesterday's post, and restoring a scrambled email to order will take more effort than I am willing to expend on it.
That being said, I left myself some notes that I can follow. I was excited to have found a giant bookstore (and a smaller one) yesterday, but I found out today that the books in it are even more expensive than the ones in Prague. I cannot bring myself to buy "The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories" for 8.99 Euros. I saw a lesbian couple yesterday, the first that I had seen in Europe. I was supposed to note Dresden's pride in having fought against communism and its student life, but I mentioned those in my email about Bautzen. Food here is very cheap in both bakeries and grocery stores, but restaurants are extraordinary-expensive and primarily feature foreign food. I was supposed to mention my plans for the next few days, but I do not want to bother that. I enjoyed the breeze coming off of the Elba; I should have mentioned that in my description of the city's air quality. People seem alive. That ties in with the bit about lesbians and students: this appears to be a live-and-let-live city, in addition to being one in which new ideas are generated and people campaign for fairness and improved human rights. I wanted to mention another health issue that came up, which consisted of spastic pains in my upper torso and an inflamed lymph node in my left armpit (That reads risibly.), but it seems to have gone away. People here are happy to engage one in conversation and even, occasionally, smile, unlike anywhere in the Czech Republic. I was going to write about my computer's no longer being able to copy and paste, which feels like saying that one has forgotten how to zip up one's pants, but the problem magically resolved itself, as computer problems often do, when I restarted my computer. I am not a big fan of the computer that I bought, despite its being light and its having been cheap, and I wish that I had been willing to shell out the money for a MacBook Air in the first place, as it would have cost a little less than the iPad plus this Microsoft laptop and would have delivered a better product.
My final two points of note are these: Dresden is a princely city, and ancient Greek literature is interesting. Dresden was clearly a city of royalty, as its most important architectural monuments lay sprawled across one side of the Elbe like lounging giants. It is hard to describe just how beautiful the city center is - one has to see it in person, to experience it, to grasp its beauty. It is the type of beauty that penetrates one's being and leaves one awe-struck: it seems too potent to exist in real life. I will not try to describe it, as I lack the poetic vigor, or imagination, or something else, to do it.
Greek literature, on the other hand, I will describe at length - at least, insofar as my impatience allows. I am not so much in a rush to finish this post (for want of internet time, out of a desire to go immediately to bed, &c.) as either tired of writing or uninterested in engaging in serious literary criticism. I am lucky that Euripides turned out to be a first-rate writer. That is, he should have done so, given the 2,500-year agreement on his greatness, but he might not have, as the style of Greek tragedies may have been anathema to me, or he could have turned out merely to not suit my taste, as the Victorian novelists have done. A few points worth noting about Greek literature are that characters in it often plunge headlong into abysses of despair or suffer other such surges of (usually negative) emotion; Euripides does a good job of making readers relate to his plays' main characters, sympathize with them, and wish desperately to know what happens to them next; the Greeks had ideas about purity that echo (not historically, but from the point of view of someone who has grown familiar with Christianity before encountering Greek literature) those of many Christians; the Greeks were exceedingly fatalistic, believing themselves helpless to oppose the fickle will of the gods, though they also believed that happy endings, so to speak, were possible; and the struggles that the protagonists of Greek tragedies undergo appear to closely mirror those that we experience today. Most interestingly from a sociological point of view, reading "Ion" revealed to me that the ancient Greeks were racist! Those who were born in Athens looked down on those born outside of it, like Muscovites, and would not even always refer to them as Greek. Women were treated like property in ancient Greece, slave labor was used everywhere, and society was rigidly stratified. It is curious that we look on ancient Greece as an ethereal society of beauty, rightness, and truth, when it was really just a society, like any other. The Greeks' scientific, philosophical, and architectural (and, perhaps, political - I would not know) advancements were colossal, but their society also had its blemishes (though it sounds like the nations surrounding it were not any more opposed to war than the Greeks themselves). Ancient Greece was not all peaches and cream!
The clouds in the sky are so thin that their salmon-pink barely stands out against the pale, almost-green twilight sky. Sparrows are coursing through the air. The patch of sky that I can see is unchanging, as though the whole sky were settling into sleep. Since this has nothing to do with what I saw yesterday, I had better cut myself off here. Dresden makes Prague look like a joke until one remembers that the latter had charms of its own.
Edit: the sky was not unchanging. The pink of the clouds has faded, so that they are no longer visible at all, and the sky is now an almost-unbroken, depthless pool of blue, with only a thin bar of ochre at the skyline, rising from the tops of trees. Watching the sunset unfold, in auspicious circumstances, must be one of the most enjoyable experiences on earth. I am lucky to have glanced through the open door leading onto the terrace at the right moment and have seen the dying sunset's evolution. It is neat that one chance glance can give one so much pleasure.
This is a view of the lake in the palace gardens.
I escaped from the Czech Republic today. The train ride out of the country was better than any that I had had over the past two weeks for three chief reasons: it was not in a Czech train, it was taking me away from the Czech Republic, and it led me past more interesting landscapes than I had seen in ages. At first, we passed villages with impressive churches surrounded, naturally, by buildings with caved-in roofs and half-collapsed walls. These gave way to villages that were far too clean, orderly, and well-maintained to have anything to do with the Czech Republic, and those villages, in turn, gave way to spectacular rock formations, wooded hills, and even a couple of castles. As we approached Dresden, the conductor said a whole bunch of stuff in German and added, in English, that we would be arriving in Dresden in a few minutes (by which he meant something like twenty-five minutes). The train itself, despite being air-conditioned, was still afflicted by its passage through the Czech Republic. It left Prague ten minutes late and grew about five minutes later with every stop: at every new city in the Czech Republic, a new announcement was made, in which the conductor apologized for the train's lateness and added five or so more minutes to it until we left the Czech Republic. At that point, the announcements stopped, and one can only presume that the train kept closer to its schedule.
I was ineffably relieved as soon as I stepped off the train in Dresden. While my Google map's directions were, as usual, wildly incorrect about the way from the train station to my hostel, I had reentered civilization. I was once again in a city with trees, parks, and ornate plazas. There were real street signs, like in North America; the streets were not littered with garbage and cigarette butts; buildings were not covered in graffiti or missing siding; some buildings looked like they had been built within the last two hundred years; and the air, while thick with cigarette smoke and exhaust from cars, was so much cleaner than in the Czech Republic that one wanted to breathe it in with one's entire body in giant gulps. People did not scowl at me when I passed them; people working in the service industry were happy to chat with me; and one man, a little later in the evening, asked me if I needed help and explained which monuments in the city center would still be open for viewing when he saw me looking confused and staring at my map. If Eastern Germany is poorer than Western Germany, it is still a hundred times more affluent and pleasant than the Czech Republic, and my return to it was like a return to life.
My first order of business was, naturally, to find my hostel. I knew where it was thanks to a map in the train station - Dresden has maps everywhere, another difference between it and Prague. There is a little city map every hundred or two hundred meters in Dresden's city center, while one would be lucky to find one or two of them in the whole of Prague. As I walked towards my hostel, I marveled at the liveliness of the people around me and the level of upkeep of the buildings to my left and right. Dresden has a great many very new buildings, from banks to shopping malls, and even has bookstores, unlike Prague. I ducked into the first bakery that I saw after passing far enough away from the train station to get low-quality food for too much money, and I was surprised at the cheapness of everything there. The bakery reminded me both how tasty German pastries are and how I do not actually want to have them every day, as one eventually gets tired of them, like anything else; one comes to crave healthier food, as odd as that might sound. When I found the cross street leading up to my hostel, I saw the word "hostel" written in spray paint on the side of a nearby, midget-like building that looked like a rundown schoolroom. In another minute or two, I was at the foot of my hostel in Dresden.
I suppose that I should not spend too much time describing the hostel in which I am staying: while it colors my impressions of Dresden and offsets my experience a little, it does not reflect any intrinsic features of Dresden, as far as I know. The hostel owner could not tell me anything useful about the city; she gave me the worst city map that I have seen on this entire trip; she led me to a stuffy room with lockers that require one to bring one's own lock (which I have done, by dint of having bought one perforce at a similar hostel that I visited, perhaps a month ago); she told me that breakfast, if I wanted it, would cost 5 Euros; and so on. This is not a hostel in which people interact with one another. It has limited internet access. It has a very uncomfortable common room. While it is a pity to have to spend three days here, things could be a lot worse: one has sometimes to remind oneself that other people get up at 6:00 or 7:00 AM each day to work nine-to-five jobs, while I am in Europe. Many such people would happily trade places with me and stay in a lousy hostel for three days in order to escape their jobs.
When I left my hostel to explore the city (that is, after I bought a goodly amount of groceries for only 10 Euros - enough for three breakfasts and lunches), I had one of my best experiences of the entire trip. Dresden is a city of stupefying beauty, a city through which one walks with mouth agape - it is a city of royalty. One does not know where to begin with the rebuilt city center. In fact, since I broke off writing this email yesterday, I will begin with the comment that I do not really want to finish it; that is, I do not want to put a lot of work into making it look nicer. If I had managed to present my observations in a logical order, rather than slapping them together like bits of dough that will not stick, then you would have a coherent picture of what I experienced; alas, I was unfocussed when I wrote yesterday's post, and restoring a scrambled email to order will take more effort than I am willing to expend on it.
That being said, I left myself some notes that I can follow. I was excited to have found a giant bookstore (and a smaller one) yesterday, but I found out today that the books in it are even more expensive than the ones in Prague. I cannot bring myself to buy "The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories" for 8.99 Euros. I saw a lesbian couple yesterday, the first that I had seen in Europe. I was supposed to note Dresden's pride in having fought against communism and its student life, but I mentioned those in my email about Bautzen. Food here is very cheap in both bakeries and grocery stores, but restaurants are extraordinary-expensive and primarily feature foreign food. I was supposed to mention my plans for the next few days, but I do not want to bother that. I enjoyed the breeze coming off of the Elba; I should have mentioned that in my description of the city's air quality. People seem alive. That ties in with the bit about lesbians and students: this appears to be a live-and-let-live city, in addition to being one in which new ideas are generated and people campaign for fairness and improved human rights. I wanted to mention another health issue that came up, which consisted of spastic pains in my upper torso and an inflamed lymph node in my left armpit (That reads risibly.), but it seems to have gone away. People here are happy to engage one in conversation and even, occasionally, smile, unlike anywhere in the Czech Republic. I was going to write about my computer's no longer being able to copy and paste, which feels like saying that one has forgotten how to zip up one's pants, but the problem magically resolved itself, as computer problems often do, when I restarted my computer. I am not a big fan of the computer that I bought, despite its being light and its having been cheap, and I wish that I had been willing to shell out the money for a MacBook Air in the first place, as it would have cost a little less than the iPad plus this Microsoft laptop and would have delivered a better product.
My final two points of note are these: Dresden is a princely city, and ancient Greek literature is interesting. Dresden was clearly a city of royalty, as its most important architectural monuments lay sprawled across one side of the Elbe like lounging giants. It is hard to describe just how beautiful the city center is - one has to see it in person, to experience it, to grasp its beauty. It is the type of beauty that penetrates one's being and leaves one awe-struck: it seems too potent to exist in real life. I will not try to describe it, as I lack the poetic vigor, or imagination, or something else, to do it.
Greek literature, on the other hand, I will describe at length - at least, insofar as my impatience allows. I am not so much in a rush to finish this post (for want of internet time, out of a desire to go immediately to bed, &c.) as either tired of writing or uninterested in engaging in serious literary criticism. I am lucky that Euripides turned out to be a first-rate writer. That is, he should have done so, given the 2,500-year agreement on his greatness, but he might not have, as the style of Greek tragedies may have been anathema to me, or he could have turned out merely to not suit my taste, as the Victorian novelists have done. A few points worth noting about Greek literature are that characters in it often plunge headlong into abysses of despair or suffer other such surges of (usually negative) emotion; Euripides does a good job of making readers relate to his plays' main characters, sympathize with them, and wish desperately to know what happens to them next; the Greeks had ideas about purity that echo (not historically, but from the point of view of someone who has grown familiar with Christianity before encountering Greek literature) those of many Christians; the Greeks were exceedingly fatalistic, believing themselves helpless to oppose the fickle will of the gods, though they also believed that happy endings, so to speak, were possible; and the struggles that the protagonists of Greek tragedies undergo appear to closely mirror those that we experience today. Most interestingly from a sociological point of view, reading "Ion" revealed to me that the ancient Greeks were racist! Those who were born in Athens looked down on those born outside of it, like Muscovites, and would not even always refer to them as Greek. Women were treated like property in ancient Greece, slave labor was used everywhere, and society was rigidly stratified. It is curious that we look on ancient Greece as an ethereal society of beauty, rightness, and truth, when it was really just a society, like any other. The Greeks' scientific, philosophical, and architectural (and, perhaps, political - I would not know) advancements were colossal, but their society also had its blemishes (though it sounds like the nations surrounding it were not any more opposed to war than the Greeks themselves). Ancient Greece was not all peaches and cream!
The clouds in the sky are so thin that their salmon-pink barely stands out against the pale, almost-green twilight sky. Sparrows are coursing through the air. The patch of sky that I can see is unchanging, as though the whole sky were settling into sleep. Since this has nothing to do with what I saw yesterday, I had better cut myself off here. Dresden makes Prague look like a joke until one remembers that the latter had charms of its own.
Edit: the sky was not unchanging. The pink of the clouds has faded, so that they are no longer visible at all, and the sky is now an almost-unbroken, depthless pool of blue, with only a thin bar of ochre at the skyline, rising from the tops of trees. Watching the sunset unfold, in auspicious circumstances, must be one of the most enjoyable experiences on earth. I am lucky to have glanced through the open door leading onto the terrace at the right moment and have seen the dying sunset's evolution. It is neat that one chance glance can give one so much pleasure.
This is a view of the lake in the palace gardens.
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