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.