A Much Nicer Area - Dresden, Sep. 16

I'm in Dresden now! I'm liking it a lot more here than Berlin, more of that below. But first, I had to get out of Berlin.

Sleeping in the space capsule was pretty nice, didn't have any disruptions from anyone else for once! I got some pretty deep sleep, so I felt pretty refreshed when I woke up. Although one problem I encountered is that daylight doesn't get into the capsules. At all. So there's no way to know what time it is other than looking at a clock. I did have an alarm set, but I found myself waking up early in paranoia thinking I'd overslept.

I turned on the light to help me wake up, the lights don't have any dimming. So either it's nearly pitch black, or blindingly bright. Not the nicest way to get up, would be nice to put the lights on a knob of some kind to adjust the brightness.

I got up at 9am, which left me with about 2 hours before my train left. It was plenty of time for me to get ready, pack up, check out, and make my way to the train station without feeling rushed at all. I got the the platform about 30 minutes early, so I think that's a good routine for the future. Most hostels seem to have a check-out time of 11am and a check-in time of 3pm, so I can spend the interim period on a train between cities.

Since I had some time to kill, I was going to pull out my headphones to listen to music, when a guy came up to me and asked "Do you speak English?" I was a bit caught off by that, given that he could have asked anyone else at the platform, and just happened to choose one of the few people who isn't German.

It gets even better. His next question was "Is this the platform to get to Dresden?" I'm going there too!!! Literally the first 2 things he said, I couldn't believe it. On top of that, even he was using the Eurail app with his trip planned out, and he's from the states too. Definitely not what I'd expected to find this morning!

It turns out he'd selected the wrong station out of Berlin when planning his trip, so he just joined me on my train to Dresden. That's definitely one of the best things about the Eurail pass, it's not a big issue if you somehow mess up your trip, you can just get on another train without having to pay extra for it. We even had our tickets checked on this train, which was no problem with the Eurail app. We chatted for most of the train journey, it was nice to have a friend for a couple hours.

Speaking of train journey, it was fairly pleasant, definitely a lot nicer than flying (yes, I'm going to keep saying it, too bad if I'm being repetitive). There weren't many exciting things to see, a lot of it was surrounded by forests, which reminded me of how much of a desert Colorado is. There were also a few houses we passed by occasionally, plus a handful of wind turbines.

We arrived at the station, where I had to part ways with my new friend. Getting to the hostel wasn't too bad, it's pretty easy to navigate if you've got you're phone with you. One annoying thing is that my suitcase has hard plastic wheels, so it's pretty loud when I'm walking through quiet streets. Especially since a lot of places have bumpy sidewalks, feels like everyone's looking at me thinking "could you keep it down!?" But that's probably just what I tell myself. Probably...

The hostel I'm staying at in Dresden is on the corner of a building, so I went through the door on the corner, which actually led into a bar. Fortunately the people there saw my bags and redirected me towards the hostel doors. Which was even more confusing. There were 2 doors covered in about 100 stickers, but I didn't see a sign indicating whether it was the entrance to the hostel. I tried opening each door, but they both felt locked.

I spent the next couple minutes trying to figure out where the heck the entrance was when I heard the door start buzzing. I pushed on the door, and it still didn't open. I pushed harder and it finally opened. Is it just me, or is it unnecessarily difficult to find business entrances in Germany? I've been expecting to find obvious signs saying something like "HOSTEL ENTRANCE" but nope, just a lot of guessing so far.

Anyways, I got checked in and made my way to the room. Here's an image from the hostel website of my room, it's pretty homely! This is way more cozy than the first hostel I stayed at, which was totally barebones and felt more like a jail.

Also, it turns out some hostels charge extra for bed sheets. Apparently that's because a lot of backpackers bring their own sheets, so it helps them save money if they don't need it. It was only 2 Euros for the sheets anyways, which isn't a deal breaker by any means. So I got to spend a few minutes making my bed, glad I know how to do that!

After settling in, I wanted to explore around the city to get a feel for it. The city center is a couple miles away from this hostel, so I decided to figure out the public transit rather than walking all the way there and all the way back. I discovered the transit company here has an app for planning routes and buying tickets like in Berlin, but this app isn't as good. In fact, I actually got stuck on the registration step because it requires a phone number, but it has to be in a specific format. And it doesn't specify what the format is, so I wasn't able to register. I tried with and without the country code, adding spaces in various places, nothing worked. I gave up and just bought a physical ticket from a machine near a tram stop.

And today was my first time on a tram! I never did end up getting on one in Berlin, but trams seem to be the main transit mode here in Dresden. I think they're nifty, basically trains that are also on the road. Or like really long busses confined to a single route. Oh, and they're all bright yellow here too, is that a German thing? It certainly makes them easy to spot!

I got off at the castle in Dresden. Or the Frauenkirche. I'm not sure which is which. There's a bunch of buildings that were destroyed in the war and rebuilt, that's pretty much all the history I know about Dresden. Regardless, I got a photo.

I kept walking past this area, and came across an awesome pedestrian area! From what I've gathered, the center of Dresden is split into a few different places. South of the River Elbe is the Altstadt, and the north side is the Neustadt. The center of each side are primarily pedestrian and bike areas that are very large, and they're loaded with people going about their days. Altstadt is bigger and seems to have a bit more activity.

I took some photos to show off these areas, because I really like them. I'll go in geographical order from south to north. This is the southernmost area of Altstadt, it's basically a big shopping area that feels pretty modern.

Next is the north side of Altstadt. This is more of a dining and social area from what I could tell, there were loads of restaurants around with lots of people. There was also a market area where you could buy loads of different things from tiny little shops.

And here's Neustadt on the other side of the river. This was also a shopping area type of place, but had a lot more foliage around than Altstadt. It wasn't nearly as busy as the south side, but there were a good number of cyclists commuting through.

Both sides of the river are connected with a few bridges. One bridge is exclusively for pedestrians and cyclists, and connects the pedestrian/bike areas of each side. It's super easy to get from the north side of Neustadt to the south of Altstadt as a pedestrian or cyclist, this area has been designed very well!

Even when you get out of the pedestrian and bike areas, cars are still uncommon except for the main roads. And there are very few main roads in downtown Dresden, less than 10 or so (depending on how you count it). The rest are these side streets dominated by people, not cars. Plenty of cyclists and pedestrians go through these streets to reach nearby places, it's wonderful having everything you need nearby. There are cars parked on these streets, and some cars do occasionally come through, but these aren't treated as through-roads. This is so much more pleasant Berlin.

And just north of Neustadt is a large park that gets used very well by the locals. It wasn't very occupied early in the day when it was cloudy and lightly raining, but it had a lot more people in it once the skies cleared this evening. There was even a group with an enormous kite, I think it was about 10m wide. I think they were trying to fly with it or something, I'm not quite sure. They had a big backpack that it was attached to with relatively short lines, and they would start running once it was in the air. It wasn't really windy enough though, so the kite kept falling back to the ground. It was fun to watch though!

While I was watching the kite group, another group sat down near me. One of them came up to me and asked if I had a lighter for his joint that he just rolled up. Now... I'm not familiar with smoking culture in Germany (or anywhere, for that matter), but the legal smoking age in Germany is 18, and this kid looked more like 15. And I couldn't tell if it was weed or not, but that's illegal for recreational use in Germany. Or at least, that's what Google tells me, it seems the culture is perhaps different from what the law says. Regardless, it didn't feel right for this kid to be smoking whatever it was.

I want to talk more about some infrastructure things here, but it's getting late, so I'll save it for the next post. One of my roommates is snoring, so I might keep my headphones on for the night. Bis bald!