Nadine’s Interlude: Having fun in Dresden

Adam’s update on our trip to Bruges might be a while since he’s composing the final essays for his second master’s degree at the moment (good luck!), so I thought I’d share a little about what we do here when not traveling or haunting various libraries and archives.

In no particular order, we’ve really enjoyed:

-Eating at Las Tapas. Las Tapas is a Spanish-style restaurant with two locations downtown, which serves, as you might have guessed, all sorts of tapas. The main restaurant is located near the famous Frauenkirche, and a smaller place in the main mall, the Altmarktgalerie. Nothing beats a day of shopping topped off with a dish of small potatoes served with a cilantro-based dip!

-Getting take-out from Sushi-Circle. Both Adam and I love sushi and it’s not been easy to find an equivalent to our favorite restaurant in Madison, Sushi Muramoto. Our first trip to the ‘best’ sushi place in town (per the most well-respected city guide to Dresden) proved quite a disappointment, but we recently discovered Sushi-Circle, a small place located in the food court of the biggest department store downtown (Karstadt). Although the selection is a bit limited and they don’t sell my favorite unagi rolls, the quality of the rolls is top notch and the soy sauce comes in little fish-shaped plastic containers. Plus, nothing beats the price of Euro 3.95 for six tasty rolls!

-Seeing Yadegar Asisi’s panoramas. Fed up with today’s over-saturated visual culture, the Berlin artist revived the 19th century art of painting city or landscapes onto large canvasses that stretch across 360 degrees. Visitors standing atop the platform in the middle of the panoramas actually feel like they are part of and overlooking the depicted land or cityscape. We saw both his panorama of Rome as it would have looked in 312, which was exhibited until February in the Panometer Leipzig, and his version of Dresden in 1756, on exhibition at the Panometer Dresden. Both were amazing, but we liked Dresden a bit more because we are so familiar with the buildings as they are right now and it was amazing to see what they city looked like 250 years ago in all of its baroque glory. For those of you who want to find out more, here’s the link to Asisi’s website: http://www.asisi.de/de/Panometer/_start_/index.html [German only, though].

Panometer Dresden.

-Catching movies at the Schillergalerie. This tiny mall is located right across from the ‘Blaues Wunder,’ a bridge built in 1893 that translates as the ‘Blue Wonder.’ ‘Blue’ because of the steel construction’s color and ‘wonder’ because it was one of the technical masterpieces of its time and spans the Elbe without actually having an anchoring pillar in the river itself. The ‘Blaues Wunder’ connects our part of town to the rest of Dresden and we cross it every single day at least two - or more often four times - to transfer from our bus to the trams heading downtown at the Schillergalerie stop. We also do our grocery shopping at Schillergalerie, or, as mentioned, catch a movie there. We usually try to stick to German movies (since English ones are dubbed here and more often than not the dubbing takes away from the quality of the film) and we saw a few good ones in the past couple of months, including “Anonyma – Eine Frau in Berlin,” a story based on the diary of an anonymous woman chronicling the arrival of the Red Army in 1945 Berlin, and “1 ½ Ritter,” a hilarious comedy containing the crème de la crème of the German acting world about two clueless knights setting out to rescue the king’s kidnapped daughter. I am now looking forward to seeing “Der Vorleser/The Reader” with a friend of mine, because we both had to read the book in German class. Oh, and apparently Kate Winslet’s very good in it, given the Oscar and all.

'Blaues Wunder' bridge.

-Attending Fasching. Now Fasching, held right before Lent, is a cross between Halloween and Mardi Grass with Cabaret stand-up comedy/political satire thrown into the mix. We attended a Fasching celebration in my home village, not Dresden, but Fasching events are pretty standard across Germany: adults dress up in silly costumes, gather at the local festival hall to listen to a program containing political and very off-color jokes mixed with some musical numbers for one to two hours, then proceed to get drunk and dance until the wee hours of the night. You might guess from the picture below what our costume choices were. The prize that night went to a couple of guys parading around as a six-pack of beer, however. They looked amazing and I wish I had pictures of them!

Scenes of a marriage...

-Playing Ubongo. This game is simply amazing. Two or more players solve a variety of geometric puzzles using a number of pre-determined Tetris-like pieces and whoever solves their puzzle fastest wins the round. Players work on different puzzles but use the same amount of pieces (three, four, or five). After picking up the small travel version we were hooked and proceeded to buy Ubongo Duel. In this version, two players solve the same puzzle and whoever solves five first becomes Ubongo Master. I am sad to report that Adam has won that title a bit more often, but I have been Master once!

An example of a completed puzzle.

-Taking walks around various parts of Dresden. We hopefully get to do this more often when the snow and ice begin to recede. We live close enough to the beautiful area of Pillnitz - which contains a very nice park and a summer castle built by the Saxon monarchs - to ride our bikes there and then take leisurely walks on the grounds and along the Elbe. We also like to stroll along the beautiful Brühlsche Terrasse downtown, which was originally a city rampart but has been open to the public since 1814 and was known as the ‘balcony of Europe’ in the 19th century.

Pillnitz Castle grounds.

Brühl Terrace collage.

-Visiting with friends! This is by far our favorite activity. We love hanging out with our friends who live here in Dresden and we also love picking up visitors at the main train station to show and share this city with them. Dresden is full of lovely restaurants, cafes, and touristy sights, so come visit us!!! To whet your appetite, go to http://www.dresden.de/dmg/en/Culture_Leisure.php