Settling in...

This fountain was originally destroyed in wartime bombing



Me, on the Elbe



New room...



...and the kitchen!


Most of the last week has been taken up by organising my new place. On Thursday I got the keys and went through the contract and paperwork, in German and yes, with a dictionary! When I was asked “Do you have a bed?”, I got a sneaking suspicious that all the furniture was about to disappear from the room, something which was confirmed when I moved into a completely empty-but otherwise very nice-room the following day. I was undaunted by this however, happy as I was just to have a permanent roof over my head and some space finally to unpack my stuff.

I am reluctant to buy furniture that I will have to abandon in a few months, so I now have a cosy floor thing going on... I have bought cushions and blankets and rugs for a little sleeping area and I have fashioned some low tables from pieces of wood and boxes. I splashed out on an amazingly comfy floor cushion and am now very snug in my new room. My room is at the top of a lovely old baroque building in a very nice, quiet neighbourhood fairly close to the university. I live with two girls, both students, Claudia and Aspasia. They both seem very friendly, speak little English, and although I see little of them I have been practising my terrible German when I do see them. The rest of the flat is quite small, but there is an excellent shower (nothing at all like the infamous Bolivian shower!) and a good kitchen where I have been whipping up some culinary delights now I can cook properly again. In true German fashion, we have a highly organised and rigid cleaning plan which amuses me somewhat and which I am slightly scared of forgetting to carry out. Talking of German timetabling, and at the risk of mentioning European transport in every blog (I am still in awe), the bus routes here are linear and are due to arrive at the bus stops on both sides of the road at the same time. And I have actually seen buses come round the corners and pull up punctually at the corresponding bus stops on either side of the road at exactly the same time. Inexplicably, this made me giggle a lot.

After getting my living arrangements finally sorted over the weekend, I have started work on the essay I have outstanding to send to England and the presentation I have to do here on Tuesday for my Geopolitics of Energy class. Unfortunately, bureaucracy dictates that I cannot yet get a card to actually take books out of the library until I have received certain paperwork, for which I require other paperwork that has yet to come through! However the weather has turned quite terrible (hail today; although it was remarked that it could have been volcanic ash...!) so I am quite content to explore the extensive English language collection and sit in the library pondering the nuances of democracy. The library is excellent and I am currently trying to calculate how many books I can read in the next few months. I am very happy to have no time-consuming meetings, events and people to organise, endless copywriting, phone calls to answer, continuous running around.... right now, my life is coffee, cake and political theory. Wunderbar!

Arrival in Dresden

The famous Freuenkirche (church) - rebuilding finished within the last five years

Funky windows! (definitely rebuilt)

This very fancy wall shows all the princes of Saxony throughout the ages

View from the Bridge (one of the poorer ones!)

While the night train was fabulously cosy and comfortable, I slept little and so was pretty exhausted when I arrived in Dresden at 6am on Tuesday morning. But with nowhere to stay yet and the city still asleep, I decided to make my way down to the university and wait there until it opened to let them know I’d arrived and see what needed to be done. Unfortunately, this did not take up as much time as planned, my map reading must have improved vastly and by 7am I was mooching through campus. So I waited til 9am, only to be given a list of things to come back with. I asked about finding a room in the university halls and was given a worried look and told that they probably couldn’t help me by now. Subsequent enquiries in various offices confirmed this, the regular student halls told me that I just wasn’t going to be around long enough to get a place, while the international halls told me that I was staying in Dresden too long to qualify for students halls, and that they were full up anyway.

I booked into the cheapest hostel I could find, on the other side of town and trekked over to find a cosy little hostel in the ‘Neuestadt’ (new town), which is actually one of the oldest parts of the city as it wasn’t bombed in the war. It’s a funky little area where most of the clubs and bars are to be found, as well as coffee shops and cafes and little hippy shops galore.

I have since been searching for a room privately and have been to see one place which I find out soon if I will get. While the hostel is nice, I am desperate to get some personal space and to be able to unpack properly and stretch out. The week has been taken up by organising unending bits of paperwork that the university seems to require, room searching and trying to brush up on my german, butI have also made excellent inroads into ‘Grapes of Wrath’, the first fiction book I have had chance to read in a while!

At first I was a little disappointed by Dresden, but I realised that my first day here I was simply exhausted and that is what I get for disappearing off to exotic locations the previous week (if you can call Eastern Europe exotic!) But further exploration took me out of shopping central and I soon discovered historic Dresden which is how most people know the city. The river Elbe flows close to the city centre and the palaces, churches, town hall and such (most of which were rebuilt exactly the same after they were bombed in the war) are located mostly along one bank and so make an impressive view from the bridges and the other side of the river. Directly opposite is lush green bank which runs down the river for a long while and which, in the sun, fills up with people who picnic, play and laze around. My first few days here were extremely hot, and I spent many hours lying in the plentiful parks and on the banks of the Elbe, studying and reading. It was very lovely!

I have also got to grips with the extensive tram system that serves the city. The trams appear punctually every five minutes or so, are clean and quiet, connect almost every street and best of all, as a student here, they are free for me! I am going to get really lazy but they are honestly so amazing. I don’t know why we don’t have more of them in Britain because there really is less traffic because they are so good, but they aren't crammed either.

So yes, it’s all good. It seems a pretty chilled out place to live, with plenty of cultural things to explore later on when I have chance. At the moment I am just relaxing, trying to get to grips with the language and find a place to make my own for the next few months.

A whirlwind tour of Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest

Bratislava- somewhat quieter than Vienna

The Austrian Parliament Building, decorated with enormous Roman/Greek gods

The streets of Vienna

The central cathedral in Vienna had an amazing roof made from coloured tiles

Leaving Prague, I headed South through the abundant Czech pine forests towards Slovakia. But the border was tantalisingly close to Vienna, so I decided on a quick detour and hopped over the Austrian border first to take a quick peep at one of the most famous European cities.

Once in Austria, the land grew mountainous and you can easily imagine Maria skipping through the hills to freedom. From Vienna, the capital, you can sometimes catch a glimpse of a mountain or two if you’re looking down the right street. I love cities tucked in the mountains since my time in La Paz. But Vienna is completely the opposite of La Paz, a fabulously grandiose city which must be home to some of the largest and most extravagant buildings and palaces in Europe. Many were built by the Hapsburgs, a royal family who ruled over much of Europe for centuries and their incredible wealth and lifestyle is evident in the legacy that they left the city. Art galleries, science museums, palaces, enormous fountains, libraries, cathedrals, parliament, theatres and opera houses; Vienna has many of all of these and each on a massive scale, making this one of the most exciting cities for culture in the past and present. While the city is a celebration of human achievement and enlightenment, there is a hidden paradox in that the vast amounts of wealth that it must have taken to build and maintain surely come from a period of boom that made Europe the centre of the world but which plundered other continents and put them in the “less developed” position many countries are in today. The science museum epitomises their view of the world at the time with two huge statues, one of Europe, a human beacon of liberty and learning, while Australia and the Americas is but a savage under conquest. On the brighter side, I had the best hog dot- sorry, Bratwurst- ever there; the sausage somehow had a melted cheese centre and it was slotted inside a baguette cut open at the end rather than the middle...Mmmm!

After spending just a day wandering through Vienna, I pushed on over the border to Slovakia and came to Bratislava, the slovakian capital, arriving on the Easter Saturday. It was a sleepy little city, presumably partly because of the Easter weekend, but I doubt that it is exactly a hubbub of activity usually. The historic centre, apparently the only part worth exploring could be walked through completely in just about fifteen minutes. But it was quite a sweet little place, and even though many of the buildings were in the same Eastern European style as the rest of the region, they seemed very run-down and rather small after Vienna’s grandeur.

There was little to do in Bratislava, so the next day it was time to head off and I ended up in Budapest after quite a journey. Coming into the city, I saw a beautiful neo-gothic palace with red domed rooftops all lit up by the side of the river and I later discovered that this was the Hungarian Parliament. It was night time, but I went for a walk with a number of Aussies and an American that I met in a friendly little hostel in the city. We got some Chinese food and had a beer, wandering along the glittering river that seems to be a prerequisite for all these cities to be built upon. Budapest is a huge and beautiful city, although it is probably not the safest place. We stopped for a while at a poignant war memorial where shoes line the river bank for a long stretch, remembering the spot where hundreds of Jews were shot in the second world war and fell into the water leaving only their shoes on the bank.

Unfortunately the next day was grey and miserable and I got soaked in the torrential rain which destroyed my shoes and made a more extensive exploration of Budapest impossible. But it was Monday already and I was getting further and further away from Dresden, now on the wrong side of Europe in comparison to where I should have been! It was time to turn around and catch the night train back to the real world, so that evening I headed back across Hungary, Slovakia, Czech and into Germany on a cosy little bunk bed tucked into a cabin on an amazing high speed overnight train that cost me less than it would to get from Plymouth to Leicester even with a railcard. I love European transport!