11.10.2009
Grand Finale: Dresden and
Leipzig
I’m back in Hannover now having returned
yesterday. Traveling was fantastic, but I’ve really been looking forward
to a day like today when I won’t do anything but sit on my ass and recover some
much-needed energy. I’ve got plenty of time to write about the last few
days of the trip, so I’ll attempt to do so with appropriate
detail.
1 – Leaving Prague
(08.10)
On our last morning in Prague, Krissi and
I just got up early, had some breakfast at the hostel, then killed the last
couple of hours first by checking out a church that we’d passed by on the free
walking tour and were interested in seeing. The tour guide had told us an
interesting legend about the church, that one night a thief snuck in and tried
to steal the golden necklace from around the statue of the virgin Mary, but the
statue came to life and grabbed the man’s arm, trapping him there until the
priest arrived. The priest discovered the man, who was now ready to repent
all his sins and renounce thieving, but the statue wouldn’t let go so the priest
had to hack off his arm with an axe, at which point the statue returned to its
pose of praying. The fucked up thing is that the priest hung the man’s arm
over the entrance inside the church as a warning to any future potential
thieves, and the arm is still hanging to this day.
We couldn’t remember the name or location
of the church, so we went to the Old Town Square where the free tour was
gathering, and found Mike, our guide for the castle tour who also does the free
tour, and asked him about it. Mike kindly pointed us in the right
direction so we were able to find it, go inside, and see that indeed there was a
disgusting, black, shriveled rotting arm hanging above the entrance. It
was a nice church otherwise, and we found the statue of the virgin Mary,
although no necklace around her neck. The whole thing just makes me wonder
from whom the priest got that arm, because the story is obviously some bullshit
he made up to impress his parish and put the fear of God in them. I gather
that most medieval priests were probably seriously fucked up in the
head.
After seeing that we still had about an
hour to kill, so we walked along the river in search of a nice café near
the castle to sit and have some tea. We were running out of time by the
time we arrived there so we couldn’t find any really nice places and just got
one at a café in the metro station, after which we rode the metro to the second
of Prague’s two train stations and made it with plenty of time before boarding
the train to Dresden.
2 – So It Goes in Dresden (08.10 –
09.10)
When we arrived in Dresden we didn’t
quite know how to find the hostel, but being back in a German speaking country I
was able to ask people at information booths and whatnot for instructions, and
found the place without much trouble. The receptionist at the front desk
who checked us in was also very helpful in pointing out where the sights were
and where the night-life was. She also took note of the fact that we were
only staying one night and told us quite bluntly that one night was plenty of
time for Dresden, as apparently there’s not that much to see or do. You
basically just walk around the Old Town and check out the buildings, or go into
a museum if you’re so inclined.
It was only 4:00 when we headed out, but
we were both very hungry so we stopped for a very early dinner of Döner Kebab
before heading to the Old Town. We’d both been craving Döner for awhile
because it was almost impossible to come by in Prague. We’d only found one
Kebab stand in the entire city, which didn’t look very good, and one in the
train station right before we left. But Dresden was absolutely littered
with them—nearly one on every street corner—and we window-shopped until we found
the one that looked the most promising, which was right across the street from
another one that looked almost exactly the same. It wasn’t the best Kebab
ever, but it satisfied the craving.
With that taken care of, we walked to the
Old Town, and along the way I explained to Krissi why I wanted to see Dresden in
the first place, about the fire-bombings in 1945 and how the city was reduced to
nothing but ashes and rubble. I also told her to read Slaughterhouse
Five by Kurt Vonnegut, as in addition to just being a great fucking book, a
lot of it has to do with Vonnegut’s own personal experience of having been in
Dresden during that fire-bombing, and seeing all those civilians get blown to
smithereens by the Allied Forces for no good reason. So it
goes.
The Old Town was very impressive, having
structures that apparently either survived the bombing or were just perfectly
reconstructed afterwards. There were a few awesome-looking buildings laden
with more statues than I’ve ever seen in any one place. The “Zwinger”
complex in particular was rather incredible, looking like an ancient Roman
pavilion lines with hundreds upon hundreds of sculptures, each completely unique
and many just awe-inspiring to look at. The other buildings all had some
charm as well, but unfortunately there just weren’t very many of them. We
were pretty much finished walking around by the time the sun was setting over
the Elba river, and we decided to kill the next couple of hours before the
night-life time began by going back to the hostel and looking up possibilities
for what to do the next morning or the following afternoon in
Leipzig.
But the hostel only had one computer with
free internet access and I didn’t feel like paying for another hour as I had
earlier, and that particular computer was being used by three young girls (one
extremely cute one) so I had to wait in the lobby for awhile. The
receptionist told the girls that other people need to use the computer but
apparently they needed at least 10 more minutes of MySpace time and that would
be it. But while I waited I just picked up some pamphlets and figured we
might do a bus tour or something the next day. The really cute girl came
around to where I was sitting, and I told her in German that it was okay, that I
didn’t need the computer anymore so she and her friends could stay
longer.
By then it was pretty much late enough to
go out drinking anyway, so Krissi and I headed out. The first place we
stopped at was a small, darkly lit little place which both of us found
appealing, and the bartender there looked like he might have also been the
owner. We liked his style too—sporting a beret and a thick, Luigi-like
moustache, chain smoking the night away. Unlike West Germany, smoking in
bars is always allowed in East Germany, I assume because the East Germans have
all been through enough real life shit that they couldn’t care less about
meaningless trivialities like second-hand smoke in public places.
“Seriously,” I could imagine them saying to any politician who dared pass such
an ordinance, “we spent half of our lives being told what we can and can’t do,
and now you want to tell us we can no longer smoke in a fucking
bar!? Well, thanks but no thanks for your health concerns, Stalin,
but I think we’ve earned the right to smoke indoors.”
We left that place after only one drink
and passed by a bunch of bars, looking for another good one, until we passed a
place from which we heard some pretty bad-ass music playing. We went
inside and went downstairs, where we found a few people jamming on some
instruments—a drum-set, guitar, and keyboard. At first we thought they
were a band, but when they finished playing they just set the instruments down
and resumed drinking, the guitarist actually taking his place behind the bar,
where he remained nearly the rest of the night serving drinks. He told us
in German—then in English when it was clear we didn’t understand—that we were
welcome to pick up an instrument and play if we wanted, but neither of us do so
we declined.
As the night went on more people poured
in, and occasionally one or two would take up some instruments and jam. We
knew we’d stumbled on one of the best possible places in town, so we knew we’d
probably spend a lot of time there. After two beers when we might have
otherwise gone off in search of an even cooler place, a few people who looked
like serious musicians came in and started setting up, so we knew we had to
stay. One by one they finished setting up and started playing—the drummer,
the keyboardist, and a guy with an acoustic guitar. After only a few
minutes of jamming, another guy—a really effeminate kid with long blonde
hair—stood up and grabbed the bass, got it all set up and joined in, totally
kicking ass and making the sound even better. He seemed to kind of piss
off the acoustic guitarist though, whom he was now completely drowning out, so
the guitarist picked up the electric and the jam continued. A short while
later, a dude with an electric violin joined in and now the sound was fucking
spectacular. We drank a few more beers and stayed there for at least
another hour, over the course of which different people would leave their
instruments and make room for others to head up and jam. The whole thing
kicked incredible amounts of ass.
But after awhile we decided we’d spent
enough time there and we should head out, so we went out into the night in
search of one last place. We found another bar which had a good DJ doing
his thing, but it was relatively empty and we only stayed for one beer, as we
were now both adequately drunk and didn’t feel the urge to get any
drunker. Of course now we had the drunken munchies, and as we’d eaten such
an early meal I figured we might as well eat again, and for the first (and
hopefully the last) time in my life I got a second Döner Kebab in one day, this
time at the place right across the street from the place we ate at earlier,
which must be part of the same business because it was exactly the same
thing.
We got back to the hostel, passed out,
and woke up the next morning way earlier than we expected, at 7:45. I
decided to get up then and there, as most hostel-goers seem to set their alarms
for 8:00 and I wanted to beat the rush to the showers. I’d checked the
previous afternoon and found that of the five showers in the men’s room, only
one had a door that you could actually close—the rest didn’t even have shower
curtains so you’d just have to get naked in front of everyone. Most
Europeans have no qualms about that sort of thing, but having grown up in
America and taught that my naked body is something to be horribly ashamed of,
I’m still not quite ready to disrobe in front of strangers. Luckily, I got
to the shower with the door before any others.
We ate some breakfast—which I really
didn’t need because I still felt full of kebab, then I bought some WiFi internet
and spent the next hour looking up stuff to do in Dresden and Leipzig.
We’d decided against the bus tour because it was just too expensive, but I
couldn’t find anything else we might like to do except check out the art museum,
but the museum was closed for renovations until next year. So I figured
we’d just walk to the Old Town again, maybe check out both churches they have,
then walk back to the main train station and head out, as the regional train to
Leipzig left every 20 minutes after the hour and I figured that would be the
perfect amount of time.
But nothing quite worked out according to
that plan. The first church was closed, and I just couldn’t find the
second one. It wasn’t on my map or anything and it wasn’t where I
remembered passing by it the day before. But we couldn’t search around for
too long because we had to get to the train station or be stuck in Dresden for
yet another hour with absolutely nothing to do, while meanwhile in Leipzig,
according to the internet, there was plenty of stuff to check
out.
I’d miscalculated the time it would take
for us to walk to the train station, as I’d been using maps of different scales
the whole time and a fifteen-minute walk by the scale of the Prague map actually
ended up being a thirty-minute walk by the Dresden map. When we were
really cutting it close I finally gave up and bought a tram ticket three stops
away from the station with only ten minutes to spare. We got to the
station with only two minutes to go, and ran to the train, not having time to
buy a ticket, and boarded just a second before it took off. I was nervous
about having boarded the train without a ticket but I figured if we just went up
to a conductor and explained ourselves—therefore making it clear that we weren’t
trying to get a free ride—they might just cut us a break and charge us
the normal price. But we walked both lengths of the train and couldn’t
find a conductor. We did however find a sign that said in German,
“First buy a ticket, then board the train.” So we decided
that maybe we’d hop off at the next station, rush to a ticket machine to buy a
ticket, then hop back on. We might manage that in a two-minute window if
the machines were right on the platform.
The next station was Dresden-Neustadt,
the second main train station in Dresden, but as we rushed along the platform we
realized there were no ticket machines to be found. We had only a split
second to decide whether to board again or whether to give up and play it
safe. We decided to play it safe, and watched the train roll away as we
went downstairs to the ticket machines to buy our ticket, then just wait around
for another hour until the next train came. We didn’t expect to have a
hard time finding a seat because the last train had been virtually empty, but
for some reason the next one was almost completely full. We were able to
find some seats and sit down, but from my seat I got a view of a group of young
people that had been staying at the same hostel as us, including the really cute
girl from the previous evening. I tried not to pay much attention but I
had plenty of time during the hour and a half train ride to fall completely in
love with her. She had a very Lauren-esque personality, just seeming to
have no interest in life whatsoever, staring blankly from her perfect face and
projecting that whole “I don’t give a fuck attitude”. And damn was she
hot. So very hot. But way too young. Frustration. But
not overwhelming frustration—it was just one of those, “Of all the seats on the
whole fucking train…” things.
But before I knew it was reached Leipzig,
the last stop on our adventure, which was to be the setting for a much bigger
coincidence—the most fortuitous traveling coincidence I’ve ever
experienced.
3 – Leipzig’s Big Day
(09.10.2009)
It had been mostly a whim that brought us
to Leipzig on that particular date. It could just have just as easily been
a day before or a day later, or we might have passed it by altogether or done a
different city. But there we were, arriving in Leipzig on the
9th of October, 2009, without any idea that this hate had any
significance whatsoever.
And as we walked to our hostel, literally
right across the street from the train station, there was nothing to indicate
that anything special was happening. The front desk agent who checked us
in said nothing, and the map he gave us which pointed us in the direction of the
Tourist Information center was just a generic map with a walking-tour route
through the Old Town with info on each major location.
We went to the Tourist Information center
to ask somebody what we should make sure to see, as I knew almost nothing about
Leipzig other than the fact that it was the city of Johann Sebastian Bach and
had been part of the Soviet Union along with every other city in the former East
Germany. We waited on line at the info center until a girl came up to us
and asked us what we wanted. I just said we were here for one day and
wanted to know what we should see. Immediately, we could tell that she was
perhaps the worst Tourist Information employee of all time, as she just handed
us a map, circled the entire Old Town, and said we could walk around and “see
your favorite sights”. Well, obviously, but what should we
see? I asked her in these exact words: “What is the one thing we can’t
miss while we’re here in Leipzig?” She just shrugged and handed us a
pamphlet for some Amazon Rain-Forest exhibit at a museum on the other side of
the city, then repeated that we could walk around and “see our favorite
sights”. Once it was clear that this was all the help we were going to
get, we thanked her and left.
The little walking-tour map that the
front desk guy at our hostel had given us was actually better than the official
map, and I figured we could spend the afternoon following the route on the map
and stopping anywhere that seemed interesting. The first stop on the map
was the train station, the largest dead-end train station in all of Europe
(which I was skeptical about because they’d said the same thing about their
station in Frankfurt) but we’d already been there so we moved on, heading down
Nikolaistraße to the Church of St. Nikolai, the next stop on our
tour.
It was here we got our first indication
that anything special was going on. There was a sign on the door that said
that for today, because of [incomprehensible German] the church would not be
opened until 16:15, which was still a couple of hours away. There were
news vans and journalists standing outside the church, so we knew something was
going on but we still didn’t know what.
Then we walked down a bit further and
found what seemed like a demonstration, but signs with a big black-and-white
picture and the words, “Leipzig ‘89” written on them. There were also a
few banners with today’s date: “9 Oktober 2009”, so we now knew that there was
come kind of celebration happening today. It must have had something to do
with the end of Soviet Rule, because the Wall came down in the Fall of 1989 and
this was 20 years later, but the Wall fell on 9 November, so what was going on
here? Maybe they just picked this day because it was a Friday that worked
for them?
When we reached the Augustusplatz point
on our map, a large square outside the Opera House, there were even more banners
and posters and news vans and journalists, including one van you could go inside
and learn about the events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
There were all kinds of dates there so this van must have been touring Germany
all year going to different cities of significance in the lead-up to the
reunification. There was a little stand with pictures and pamphlets
outside the van, and Krissi picked one up and asked a woman who worked for this
van-tour project thing if she could take one. The woman answered in
English that she could, so I decided to also ask straight up, in English, if the
date of October 9th had any particular significance for the
particular city of Leipzig.
Well, yes, actually it did.
Apparently exactly 20 years ago to the day, there had been a peaceful protest of
70,000 Leipzigers which began outside the Church of St. Nikolai, and it sparked
protests all over East Germany that led directly to the collapse of the Berlin
Wall. (The story our tour guide Inez had told us at the end of the Berlin
Wall, about how the government thought they could appease the people by
pretending to open up travel between East and West but really put too many
restrictions for it to actually work—only then to have that news delivered by a
fool who didn’t realize the plan and just said they were pretty much opening up
the Berlin Wall for good—was the result of these protests that had begun that
day in Leipzig).
Unbelievable. By pure dumb luck,
we’d arrived in Leipzig on the 20-year anniversary of what is pretty much the
most important date in the city’s history. We were sure that night
that everyone would be out celebrating and partying—thus making for the perfect
end to our little tour of Germany.
From there we continued our walking tour,
next heading up downtown Leipzig’s tallest building to check out a spectacular
panoramic view of the city. The weather was also perfect—completely clear
with blue skies and a temperature that made you never think of the
temperature. The view was awesome, and it only cost €2 so that was
nice.
After that we went to the City History
Museum of Leipzig, which was the perfect thing for us to see on that day.
In addition to works of art by Leipzigers depicting the general feeling of life
during Soviet rule, it had all kinds of artifacts from the period of time
between the end of Nazi rule and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Video
footage of various moments of historical significance were also prominent, and
as I read the captions and picked up the ear-pieces to listen I found that I
knew enough German to get the gist of everything. So that was a nice
little history lesson to reinforce our understanding of the day’s
significance.
The next few stops on the tour weren’t as
interesting—shopping districts, the Old and New City Hall and whatnot, but the
second-to-last stop, the St. Thomas Church, was pretty fucking awesome as it was
where Bach himself worked during the entire latter part of his life, from 1723
to 1750. His remains were buried right there outside under a big polished
stone. We also learned from the tour map that the Boys’ Choir, which is
the oldest in Germany (started in 1212) and was directed by Bach himself during
his time there, sings there every Friday night at 18:00. It was currently
17:00, and we figured we simply had to check it out.
We killed the remaining hour by looking
at the last stop on the tour—just a road right outside of the Old Town with a
bunch of restaurants—and then back to the Church of St. Nikolai to see if it was
now open. It was indeed open, but the crowd outside and inside was so
thick that we stood there for ten minutes without moving an inch (although I’m
pretty sure we made it onto German television because there were a shit-load of
cameras there scanning the crowd).
We left and went back to the St. Thomas
church with 15 minutes to spare. It was €2 to get in but we gladly paid,
then took a seat in a giant hall and waited. They’d given us a program on
the way in, which I was surprised to see was actually a program for a genuine
church service, with a sermon and prayers and everything. So for the first
time in fuck knows how many years, I actually attended
church.
And it was safe to say that it was the
most kick-ass church service I’ve ever been to. It opened with a few words
from the priest about the significance of the date, then kicked into gear with
the choir director playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D on the organ as a
special tribute to the date, which meant we got to hear my favorite Bach piece
in the actual church where Bach fucking worked. After that bit of
awesomeness, the boys began, and holy shit were they awesome. I had been
expecting something nice and pleasant but these boys were just mind-blowingly
good. I was getting chills up and down my spine and all over my body, the
sound of it was just so amazing. They sang five little pieces, then the
priest delivered a sermon I surprisingly understood much of—pretty much about
the role God played on this night 20 years ago—then everyone was invited to sing
a hymn along with the boy’s choir, a couple more pieces by the choir alone,
everyone rising for the German Lord’s Prayer, and finally two more amazing
pieces by the boys. There was never any applause or anything, and when the
last piece was over everyone just got up and left.
That was probably the highlight of the
day. What followed was by far the lowlight—the biggest disappointment of
the entire trip. It hadn’t occurred to us that there might be some big
event going on in town at a certain time to celebrate the anniversary, so when
we left that church we just decided to satisfy our hunger and go to one of the
restaurants on that street from the end of the walking tour. The fact that
the street was like a ghost-town and pretty much every restaurant was totally
empty should have clued us in to the fact that something was going on, but we’d
never been to Leipzig on a Friday evening before and for all we knew this was
how it always was.
It wasn’t until we’d already sat down at
a placed our dinner order that Krissi said, “Do you think something is going on
in town right now?” and I asked the waitress in the best German I could muster
if there was indeed some kind of celebration happening right now. She said
there was but it was in the city, then she asked her colleague something and
told us something about 8:00. I assumed that meant it began at 8:00, and
since it was now 7:45 I guessed that if we ate fast enough we’d get there at
8:30 at the latest and it would probably still be going on.
So we scarffed down our food, which was
excellent but we weren’t focusing on enjoying it because we were too concerned
about missing the Big Event, and after 8:00 more people started coming to the
restaurant and we began to get this sinking feeling like whatever was happening
had already happened. Nevertheless, we quickly paid and got the hell out
of there, but as we reached the Old Town we just saw thousands of people all
walking out, in the other direction.
At that point we knew we’d missed it,
that the waitress must have meant that it ended at 8:00, and we were
kicking ourselves left and right for not fucking realizing that something was
going on before it was too late. It hadn’t even fucking occurred to
us that there might be some major gathering of all the people in Leipzig to
gather at the St. Nikolai Church or the Augustusplatz at dusk to hold candles
and sing a song or something to celebrate the big 20-year anniversary of their
city’s biggest night.
We tried to mitigate our huge
disappointment by telling ourselves things like we didn’t miss anything we’d
been planning to see anyway, that it was still really cool that we got to see
what we did and that had we arrived at Leipzig one night later we would
have missed the whole fucking thing and been much more disappointed. But
we knew it was of no avail. We’d missed a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to
be there when an entire town came together to commemorate the most significant
event in its history. Instead we’d gone for fucking dinner, and
been too dense to realize that the fact that the streets were empty actually
meant something.
We ultimately decided to blame that
god-awful bitch at the tourist information center, as she could have—really
fucking should have—told us what was going on, that it was a big day in
Leipzig and everyone would be gathering in the square at dusk to hold candles
and sing a song in celebration. I mean, I actually asked her: “What is
the one thing we can’t miss while we’re here in Leipzig?” and she just
handed us a goddamned rain-forest exhibit platform. Seriously, she should
be fired and burned at the stake for that shit. What the fuck?! I
mean What. The. Fuck?
Anyway, we got to Augustusplatz where the
scene was still pretty crazy. Thousands of people were still there, lights
were flashing on all the buildings with words about the big anniversary, and a
giant “Leipzig ‘89” was spelled out in candles in front of the steps of the
Opera House. As we walked back to the hostel along the streets which had
been cordoned off to road traffic by the police, we passed several platforms
right on the tram tracks (also cordoned off, of course) with about five
performance artists each painted all grey or red and dressed in grey and red
clothing of the East German style, standing frozen in motion, I suppose to
remind people of the melancholy atmosphere of the time. On one of the
platforms there was actually a little seven-ish-year-old girl sitting at her
mothers’ feet with a look of the utmost boredom on her face, and I couldn’t
believe they actually dragged her into that. “Don’t worry, honey, it’ll be
fun! You just sit there looking sad and not moving for several
hours!” She must have had no idea what she was getting into. Either
that or her mother promised to buy her ice cream every day for a year after
that.
Still disappointed, but glad that we at
least got to see way more interesting shit than we would have seen had we
arrived on any other date, we got back to the hostel, got our shit together for
out last night of drinking, then headed back through town, still swarming with
people, and down to the night-life area on the road where all the websites said
it would be.
I’d thought there would be a lot more
people out celebrating, but in that area it was mostly young people who were
just kids during communist times so it was just an average Friday night to them,
and the atmosphere didn’t feel much different than other German cities on a
Friday night. We stopped at the first place we came across because it had
been a ridiculously long walk to get there, and got a shot of Jäger and a beer,
agreeing that after we took the shot we would no longer bitch and moan about how
we’d stupidly missed the most significant event of the whole fucking
day.
And we abided by our pact. As we
went from bar to bar we talked about everything but that bullshit, and only
mentioned the significance of the day in a positive light—like how fucking cool
is it that we were even there on this date in the first place? And let’s
not forget that Boys’ Choir. That was definitely a priceless
experience.
We were hoping to find some live music
but we didn’t get any. Just an 80s bar, an Irish pub, a bar that seemed
like a gay bar but might not have been (we only thought so because guys were all
talking to guys and girls to girls and the bartenders were definitely dykes),
then one last place which turned out to be really pleasant with friendly
bartenders and a good atmosphere. On the way back to the hostel, our long
30-minute walk, we stopped into a Kebab shop for one last Döner (I don’t think
we’ll be eating any more of those) which turned out to be the absolute best,
most delicious one I’ve ever eaten.
When we finally got back to the center of
town it was only 2:00 a.m., but we were shocked to find that the streets were
now practically empty. We’d figured that on such a significant date, and
on a Friday night at that, there would be people wandering the
streets with open beer, singing and celebrating all night long. But either
everyone had gone to bed, they were celebrating in their own homes, or it just
wasn’t as big a deal to them as all the hooplah had made it seem. For one
thing, I know many East German people actually miss the old communism days, not
that you’d have gotten any impression of that from the signs and banners, or
even the history museum. Perhaps this was simply a night of commemoration
of the big peaceful protest, and they’re saving the Big Party from a month from
then, November 9th, the day of the actual fall of the Berlin
Wall. But it’s possible that most of them, while proud of their city for
what it had done, actually represents a change worthy of celebration—that things
sucked then and now they just suck in a different way. That tends to be
the attitude of most East Germans I’ve talked to.
But we stopped into an Irish Pub for one
last drink, and asked the really cute English-speaking bartendress what was
going on. She said she hadn’t been upstairs (it was a basement bar) for
hours and was surprised herself to hear that there was nobody out there.
But apparently that was the situation, and I found it downright
fascinating. Germans usually never miss an excuse to have a wild drinking
party, and I’m sure than during next month’s big November 9th
celebration in Berlin (which I’m now seriously considering going to) they’re
going to be drinking and singing well into the morning. But that’s Berlin,
a city with a character all to itself, and you’ll have both East and West
Germans alike participating which means enough of them will actually feel like
the fall of the Wall was a good enough thing to celebrate all
night.
So after that, our last beer of the trip,
we walked back to our hostel, fell asleep, and woke up the next morning to a
city that showed practically no indication that anything special had happened
there the night before. All the big screens and things were gone. A
few banners remained but everything was just as clean and spotless as it had
been the day before. We left our bags in the luggage room of the hostel
and spent our last hour walking around before it was time to go, and it seemed
like any other German city on a Saturday morning.
When it was time to go we got our bags
and walked across the street to the train station and boarded the train for
Hannover, which I was amused to find is actually one of the trains I take back
from work in Helmstedt when I’ve got to switch over in Braunschweig, as it
begins in Leipzig and ends in Köln, stopping in Braunschweig and Hannover along
the way. I listened to Pink Floyd on the whole way back, in amazingly good
spirits while reflecting on what had been, overall, a totally fantastic life
experience. Naturally, there were plenty of snafus, frustrations, and
disappointments (some major disappointments) but overall it was every bit
as awesome as I’d hoped it would be, and in some ways even
better.
And that concludes the documentation of
my travels around Germany with Krissi. With Strasbourg and Prague as added
bonuses, we got the full German experience. If you count Berlin and
Hamburg as a kind of “prologue” then we really hit all the major cities.
We got Cologne in the West, then Ichenheim for a taste of small village life in
the Black Forest region, the Bavarian Alps for a tour of Germany’s most
excellent location for natural beauty, the obligatory trip to Oktoberfest which
was even more fun than we expected, and finally two of the most famous East
German towns with Dresden and Leipzig, concluding on a day of great significance
for the city we finished in, the 20-year anniversary of not only Leipzig’s most
historic day, but one of the most historic days in the history of Germany.
All in all, I now feel like I’ve gotten the most out of my time in Germany, as
even after living in the country for two years I’ve never had such a clear
impression of the culture and history throughout the entire nation—its
differences and similarities and what binds it all together. Now more than
ever I feel I’m ready to move on and discover another part of the planet,
hopefully to learn and absorb just as much about that place—probably Japan—as I
have about Germany.
The high from the last two months’ travel experiences will eventually wear off, but it will always be a part of me, and will be remembered, just as I’d hoped, as one of the greatest overall experiences of my life.