Walking through Dresden’s Old Town is a visually rewarding experience that leaves its tourists feeling they got their money’s worth before they’re herded back into their buses to do some further grazing in Prague. The Neumarkt, an ambitious construction project whose goal is nothing less than to rebuild the city’s heart in its pre-war, baroque style, is Dresden’s crown jewel. Every day of the year, rain or shine, legions of sightseers can be found admiring the reborn beauty of the Frauenkirche and surrounding Wilhelminian houses while blowing a few thou’ on a porcelain figurine or the latest fuel-injected wrist watch. Yes, all is well in Vacationville.

Or almost. For even in this paradise of appearances, there lurks a menace whose threat is not readily discernible, but all the more destructive for it. It wears on your nerves and grates on your mood like a pebble in your shoe and can reduce an otherwise sunny, carefree afternoon to the equivalent of a root canal without anesthetic. I am referring, of course, to bad street musicians, the plague of the 21st century. Armed with their grandmother’s three-string violin or a guitar stolen from the local thrift shop, these terrorizing troubadours surround the place like a gaggle of not-so-undercover agents, plucking and wheezing mercilessly on their defenseless instruments. Some of them are local music students whose parents refuse to let them practice anywhere near the house. Others drip in from that bottomless pool of foreign youth wanting to impress friends back home by living bohemian for a summer. All of them live on the absent-minded generosity of Mr and Mrs Packagetour, who drop whatever loose change they have into the offender’s upturned cap, regardless of the quality. This only encourages the beggars to return the next day and every day thereafter, polluting the environment with tone-deaf-inspired renditions of some well trodden piece by Mozart, Vivaldi or the Beatles. And just as you don’t blame a dog for shitting in front of your house but rather the dog owner for never training it, I hold the donators responsible, those people with pockets far deeper than their musical taste. For mere pennies a day, they can annoy a family of five for an entire week.

It never fails, however, that just as I’m about to march into the Old Town with a bag full of corks and a pair of scissors to end the misery of all those suffering instruments (not to mention, my ears) I find an individual - a musician - among the group whose skill and class blend in seamlessly with the surroundings. But what Katrin and I saw a few weeks ago during a stroll through the area surpassed anything we’ve seen yet. Not only was this guy talented with his instrument, his instrument was a freakin’ grand piano. Just like the hobby hippy with the hand-painted guitar or that one guy who played ‘Yesterday’ on his plastic recorder for an entire afternoon, the grand piano man performed on the street in front of the castle. True to their musical indifference, the tourists seemed unfazed even by this unique sight, parting with their change at about the same rate they would for the eight-year old boy torturing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ from his rusty saxophone. We watched him play for a while and then moved on. For the first time in a long time, I also contributed to his financial collections in the hope that he might return tomorrow - unlikely, considering what he has to schlep around. I’m just glad I had the chance to hear him, even if he was playing Elton John.

The bathrooms just keep getting weirder and weirder around here. First the single toilet paper dispenser and now this:

Is that really necessary?

I mean, give me a break, would ya? I’m already permanently scarred from the demoralizing effects of stage fright. During my time in the military, we often had to take ‘pop piss tests’ to make sure our finely tuned fighting machines were not polluted with foreign substances. An officer would pull your name out of a hat and off to the bathroom you’d go with a plastic cup in hand. Just to make sure you didn’t stash a secret supply of clean urine to swap with your own contaminated brand, an observer would accompany you to the loo. And watch you. As you peed. Into a cup. These people were called ‘meat gazers’, and I’m not sure whose job was more difficult, theirs or mine. Many a time I stood impotently in front of the urinal, the cold stare of my personal escort causing more shrinkage than a glacial-fed lake on a windy day. No matter how many colas and canteens of water I threw back, I couldn’t get the tap to run. “False alarm” I’d mutter, humiliated after another attempt, and my personal meat gazer would shake his head and wonder aloud if I wasn’t really entertaining some sick fetish at his expense. “Drink a gallon of water and be back here in ten minutes,” he’d order.

And those were the easy times for me. Far worse were those rare occasions when “number one” demanded a co-performance with “number two”. The first time I had to slam on the brakes while standing at the urinal, I thought I would be granted temporary immunity from the eyes of my chaperon. I was mistaken.

“I have to, uh … I need to sit for this one,” I announced. He let out a long sigh. “Fine.” I entered the stall and tried to close the door behind me, but something got caught at the last moment. It was him. The instant I saw him standing in the doorway, I realized what was going to take place here. There would be an audience. Immediately I tensed. My spine grew rigid. Things began to pucker.

A little privacy would be nice.

At this point you might be thinking “God’s teeth, man, why the prudish modesty? Out with it, and be done!” Let me explain. It wasn’t simply the presence of someone else that placed selected bodily functions into a deep freeze. I have at times shared a role of toilet paper and yesterday’s sports page with no fewer than eleven other marines while answering Nature’s call. But even a Victorian throw-back could see the difference between going with someone and going for someone. As the meat gazer stood above me, as I sat before the meat gazer with my camouflage trousers bunched around my ankles like shrubbery gathered about two hairy white tree trunks, I felt like some sentient amoeba blotted on a slide beneath the clinical glass eye of a microscope.

There was no chance of me actually doing anything on the toilet, I knew that already. And because of what we’d been through together over the years, the sergeant probably knew it too. But here we were, a one-man act before a one-man audience. The show must go on! I waited. I pushed. I even grunted a little, not of necessity, but simply to show him that I wasn’t enjoying this any more than he and was making a sincere effort, a sort of good-will gesture.

This continued for a few minutes with no discernible progress made and, in all honesty, none expected. Just as I was beginning to wonder if my awkward predicament wasn’t a violation of some little-known sub-clause of the Geneva Conventions, I was finally granted mercy. “Jesus Christ,” he exclaimed, exasperated, “I’ll be a sergeant major before you finish.” And with that he took a step back and closed the stall door, leaving me alone. “No funny stuff,” he warned. “I’m still listening.”

Free at last.

Let me pee in peace, please!

Don’t look now, but there’s snow on the horizon. Actually, there’s snow on our balcony, and the neighbors’ roofs. And it’s only the second day of November. Now I know that East Coast USA already got a pre-season pounding the likes of which Dresden rarely sees even in the darkest days of late January. But there’s a different climate here, a schizophrenic one, vacillating between maritime and continental. One day it’s lukewarm, the next it’s lukecold. Normally, seasons don’t get around to asserting themselves until the end of their shift, like sitting at your desk for 7 ½ hours before remembering you actually have to work a bit before you punch out. Ha! Even Mother Nature’s got a bureaucratic streak in Germany.