Dresden

Ask me about the most beautiful waterfall in Fiji! Ask me where the sea turtles swim in the Dominican Republic! Ask me about the best of 92% of all gyros stands on Rhodes! Ask me about the most beautiful volcano in New Zealand! But when a couchsurfer asks me: “Which city in Germany should I visit?”: I just stand there like an ox in front of a mountain.

For the blog generation, no spot on the map is whiter than their home country. After much deliberation, I have to admit that I only know three cities in Germany well. That has to change. A customer calls me to Saxony. The afternoon and evening belong to Dresden.

There’s something beautiful everywhere. If you don’t believe that, just keep watching “The Emigrants” and farting in your armchair. Only the things that are different catch the eye. You run blindly past the same things and then bang your head at the next set of traffic lights. You look up, see the slightly different East traffic light man and self-righteously judge it as confirmation of your own world view in the form of stabbing pain just next to your eye.

My hostel is in the Neustadt neighbourhood. Neustadt is the Kings Cross of Dresden. Head shops, eco shops, pubs, restaurants and an alternative art scene. The only difference to Kings Cross are the non-existent millionaires’ mansions with their inconspicuous “Trespassers will be executed” signs. Pubs battle it out for the right to have the hottest name: Planwirtschaft, Schnurz and Mondpalast win the race. The rest is a colourful mix of old, new and post-communist car park allocation: everyone pays everywhere, all the time.

I realise how dead all the renovators have made my home town. Everything new, everything clean, everything expensive. And all the same. At home, architecture is an equation. Here it never works out. The tension in between is alive. I set off in the direction of the old town. But as soon as I leave the new town, everything becomes boring: old, renovated, overcrowded and in between, manically snapping Japanese Godzilla clones in extreme body contortions.

In short: the Saxon state parliament. Inexplicable spontaneous Radeberger drinking binge in front of the Semperoper. The completely reconstructed Friedenskirche. Zwinger Palace. Concert in the park. Consumption in consumption. The most beautiful thing today was definitely the crocheted idyllic landscape curtains of a window in my client’s LPG. That alone was worth the journey.

In the evening, a falafel at Habibi and the fear of the night: my 10-bed dorm directly adjoins the kitchen for 40 residents. There are 50 empty bottles in the kitchen. The illustrious group comes home at three o’clock. Two men and two women. Drunk kids. I hide in the top left corner of the bed in anticipation of the inevitable. Then I realise that I’m not lying in a bunk bed. No one is going to shag above me today.

I leave quietly in the morning. I don’t intonate a sweet and sour German song on my vuvuzela, which I’ve brought along especially for punitive actions. I don’t even accidentally knock over the steel locker, and I don’t accidentally fall on an alcoholic corpse with my elbow while getting dressed. I’m missing something…