Friends of mine from Columbus visited Katrin and me at the end of March and beginning of April. It’s been a while since we last hosted guests from the US. There was a time when our rickety futon tortured the backs of a steady stream of budget-minded friends from overseas. In recent years, however, that stream has all but dried up, leaving me to wonder why. I suspect the futon.
I picked up Mike and Connie at Berlin’s Tegel Airport early one morning. It is not a large facility; nevertheless, my friends and I spent half an hour in a counterclockwise hunt for each other around the cramped, doughnut-shaped premises. Berlin, by far Germany’s largest city, has two undernourished public airports (the other one is Schönfeld). It only took politicians and businesspeople seventeen years from the fall of the Wall to grasp that one BIG airport might not give visitors the impression they were diverted from the nation’s capital to a neighboring village. Finally the three of us met. Joyous reunion. Let’s check out the city.
Like too many Americans, my friends are not burdened with much vacation time. Europeans like to criticize us for not seeing enough of the world. Well, coddled snoots, convince our employers to grant us another four weeks paid leave each year, lower the price of an overseas plane ticket, and just maybe more of us will come visit you, if that’s what you really want. Mike and Connie had never been to Europe before and didn’t know when they’d be back again. Their two-week itinerary was an ambitious tour of Germany (Dresden, Berlin, Alps), Paris and anywhere else time allowed. As their local contact, I felt a responsibility to give them their money’s worth. Our limited time in Berlin made this easy: a round trip through the inner city (main train station, government district, Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, Alexanderplatz, Currywurst for lunch, Museum Island, Unter den Linden) ate up all the time we had before hustling back to the train station.
Dresden proved a more challenging subject. No, it can’t be compared to Berlin in size, scope or number of ironic t-shirt wearers, but I know it far better, and we had more time. Dresden might be a small town, but it punches well above its weight in cultural offerings. Where to begin? The Altstadt (old town), of course. The city’s tourist-oriented reconstruction of the baroque center destroyed in the 1945 firebombings is a must for anyone even just passing through from Berlin to Prague. Art, architecture and amusement (such as the crescive Weisse Gasse) are all tucked neatly within strolling distance of the Elbe River’s south bank. In the evenings we stayed closer to home in the Neustadt (new town), Dresden’s drinking-holes-for-the-masses neighborhood.
Where most tourists would have reboarded the bus at this point with the sense of having seen it all, we were just getting started - or should have been. My list of 317 things I’ve yet to do in Dresden had hardly been dented. But already our guests were reflecting upon a successful trip and thanking us for being such wonderful hosts (we’d replaced our futon with a fold-out couch). And though we love being praised just about any time, it felt a bit premature to start rolling the fond-memories video montage two days before departing. But two days passed too quickly. Day 1 was spent in Meißen with Onkel Werner and Tanta Erika at their vineyard. The bond created by a generous combination of homemade wine, stunning landscape and charming company - further strengthened by crushing the language barrier with hands and feet - left us wishing the evening could stretch on forever.
On our last full day together we traveled to nearby Königstein in the Saxon Switzerland to see the 13th century trade route fortress. The weather was warm. People were everywhere. Spring had finally established itself. On the way back home, we stopped in Loschwitz to see the Blaues Wunder bridge, built in 1893. There was still much more to see, but time was up. The next day, we accompanied Mike and Connie to the train station, where we listlessly nursed drinks in a café before their train arrived. There was talk of future visits and future plans to continue our tour of Dresden where we left off. Then they boarded the train and were gone. And Katrin and I went to see more of the city.
