My old friend J. called me today after way, WAY too long out of touch. "Where the hell are you?" he asked, and I shot back, "in a five-star hotel room in Dresden with no pants on."

For reals, all you out there in radio land-- I don't know where RIAS gets their money, but for these two days in Dresden we're staying at a historic pile with jacuzzis in every room and the fanciest pool I've ever seen. Whoo-ee! I slipped and fell in the sauna and nearly cracked a rib, but I can't feel sorry for myself, somehow.



I'm sorry I've been such a terrible foreign correspondent-- I STILL haven't written another installment of the official blog, and at this point I have no idea if I'll manage it. Just to give you an idea of how packed and exhausting our days are, Saturday (our last day in Berlin) was supposedly a free day, so they offered us a morning excursion to Potsdam (which is the next town over, just across the famous bridge where East and West used to exchange spies). So in one morning they carted us to the house of the Wannsee Conference (AAAIIIGH!!), then Cecilienhof, which is where Churchill, Stalin, and Truman carved up Europe (OOOOOH!), and finally Frederick the Great's palace of Sans Souci (WHEEEE!) and a quick lunch in chokingly quaint downtown Potsdam, then back to Berlin where we fought through hordes of tourists to see the ruined church they call the Tooth (SIGH). Then I spent an hour or so in the brutally crowded KaDeWe (that's sort of like the Harrods of Berlin) getting souvenirs, and at last I ran over to the Zoo on my own to meet a friend and see Knut the Eisbär for all of five minutes (AWWWW!) and have a beer in a lovely beergarden by the Zoo. And after dinner, since it was our last night in Berlin, two of the girls on the program persuaded me to go clubbing with them-- and hoo baby are Berlin clubs snotty. We finally got into the third place we tried, and drank and danced until 2am, and THEN I came home and packed. I figure if I get in trouble with the EU regulations for checked baggage weight on the way to Brussels, I can always store stuff in the bags under my eyes.

So anyways, let's skip right over the rest of the week in Berlin and get to Dresden, already. I didn't expect to like it so much-- I'd only ever come through Dresden on the train before, and from the train, all you can see are socialist slab palaces. Nicely restored, but but 'Florence on the Elbe?' Naaaah. Not after the Allied bombers got done with it. That, however, was seven years ago (my visit, I mean, not the firebombing), and since then the industrious Saxons have been beavering away, rebuilding Dresden in more or less the image of its former glory. The downtown is really very nice-- it reminds me a lot of Prague, although Prague with considerably more pretensions to culture, and unlike Prague, it's positively ringing with the sound of construction.

We got to Dresden yesterday noonish, and had a free hour before our scheduled walking tour, so a bunch of us ran over to the Zwinger-- which is not, as you might think, anything to do with German suburbanites in bondage gear, but rather a lovely Baroque museum housing Old Master paintings, crazy-ass armor, and a huge collection of Meissen porcelain (which is historically interesting, since Meissen was the first town in Europe to duplicate Chinese porcelain, but I didn't have time to go look at it). The Zwinger has the famous Sistine Madonna (ever see those dopey pouting cherubs? This is the original), a Vermeer, some Holbeins, and my favorite, Van Dyck's portraits of poor old Charles the First of England, along with his wife and kids. I've seen those portraits reproduced in countless history books, but stumbling unexpectedly across them in the Zwinger was a treat. Then I ran across the way to the armor exhibit, which was OFF THE HOOK-- more crazily carved and jeweled and ornamented arms and armor than you can shake a stick with. I was longing for a reënactor to explain it all to me-- orkamedies, where are you? THEN it was time for a walking tour of Dresden, the highlight of which (IMHO) was a huge tile mural called the 'Fürstenzug,' which means, more or less, the 'Parade of Princes.' It stretches for several hundred feet and depicts every ruler of Dresden (and they were all from the Wettin family, which by the way was vaguely related to Victoria's beloved Prince Albert) from 1873 all the way back to the very first Wettin in the 12th century. The mural was originally sgraffito (don't ask me what that is, all's I know is it has something to do with scratching on plaster) but had deteriorated so much by the start of the 20th century that it was redone with Meissen tiles-- which, poetically enough, survived the firebombing of Dresden untouched, since porcelain is fired at such high temperatures.

I guess I hadn't had QUITE enough culture after that, so I hit the New Green Vault, an exhibition of more than a thousand fantastically jeweled court doodads collected by the great Saxon ruler August the Strong and his assorted relatives. OH MY FUCKING GOD. Room upon room upon ROOM of the most unbelievably gorgeous craftsmanship in gold and ivory and jewels and everything else-- hundreds of faces carved on one cherry pit! Little dancing men made out of baroque pearls that looked like someone's butt! A clock with a glass gobe containing a jeweled golden Orpheus playing the lyre for wild beasts while a little enameled cupid pointed out the time! A goblet balanced on the golden horns of an enameled stag, topped with an ivory Artemis in a bath dripping pearls! A huge sailing ship carved of ivory, even to the sails! A green diamond as big as my thumb! THE ENTIRE GODDAMN COURT OF AURANGZEB REPRODUCED IN SILVER, GOLD, ENAMEL, AND GEMS!!!! IT WAS THREE FEET SQUARE AND THERE WERE IVORY ELEPHANTS BEARING JEWELED MOORS IN WROUGHT-GOLD HOWDAHS!!!! Sorry, I'm getting a little worked up. I dug the Green Vault.

And then we had dinner in a place that's basically Dresden's version of Medieval Times. I think you probably had to be there-- but it was pretty goddamn funny hearing our guides trying to tell us that the costumed waitresses all had nice cleavage.

Today, the highlight was a trip to VW's famous Transparent Factory-- which I had seen on MeFi or Boingboing or somewhere similar, but being there was something else entirely. The whole place is basically a marketing stunt, which the plant director admitted to us-- it's designed to get people to accept the idea that VW can make luxury cars. Hence the insanely luxurious and ultramodern plant with its overhead production line (no pits! no grease!) where the cars process grandly by on their beechwood floored conveyor belt with built-in air conditioning and induction power (apparently you don't have to plug in your work cart, just park it over one of the induction points). All the workers wear spotless white suits, and they putter around the cars as big robotic parts carts glide eerily around on hidden rails.

Then we had YET another tour, this time of the rebuilt Church of Our Lady (one of Dresden's famous landmarks) and YET another meeting with a government minister (Saxony's minister for labor and economic issues) who didn't say anything real, and MORE heavy German food for dinner, and now I am VERY tired. Tomorrow we head for Prague! I can't wait. I hope it isn't TOO overtouristy and expensive... I'm so homesick for Prague, it isn't even funny. One other guy on the program lived there as well, so he and I have been driving everyone nuts reminiscing and attempting to remember Czech words. So I had better sleep, but let me leave you with a few pics.

Your Eastern Correspondent poses with the Trabant, otherwise known as the Cardboard Car of the People (they weren't really cardboard, they were cotton waste mixed with plastic-- not much better)



The banality of evil: a cherub in the gardens of the Wannsee House.



Stalin's study at Potsdam, in case your taste for evil wasn't sated:



I am SO going to Photoshop this to read "Hakuna Matata"



The Zwinger, and a view of Dresden's royal palace from its roof.





Martin Luther in front of the reconstructed Frauenkirche (which, despite being named for Our Lady, is in fact a Lutheran church). The dark stones are left over from the original building, which was bombed into rubble by the Allies.



CrrAAAAZY VW plant!



The princes of Dresden, all in a row: