Thursday, June 2 -- Dresden

Martin had bought some milk that tasted almost as good as the one we drink in Finland. We thought we have all the time in the world, until we suddenly noticed that our train leaves in 25 minutes and we still haven't packed almost anything. Somehow we still managed to be so quick that we actually had to wait at the station. We took the City Elephant to hl.n. aka main station. Timo noticed that the "main" part in the station name means "head", just as in Finnish. The conductor was a cute girl with dreadlocks. We had some fun looking at the view from a reflection, which caused it to look like going backwards. The illusion was strong enough to make braking feel like acceleration.

Eurocity sounds like the fastest train ever, but it seemed to stop in every suburb of Prague. We found free places in a private six-person compartment. Soon the conductor came to explain that we really should not sit there, since this family has reserved them. Usually the reservations are marked on the walls, but this time it hadn't been possible for some reason. We wondered why the family didn't show their reservations themselves, since that doesn't require any language skills. Maybe that's some of the politeness us Finns don't understand? We felt like they thought we had been somehow impolite, but how could we have known to move without anyone telling us?

The route to Dresden had been marked as especially beautiful to our railway map, and the steep banks of Elbe/Labe were indeed gorgeous. It seems this area hadn't been as important as Rhine in the medieval times, since we only saw one single castle, where the same length of Rhine would probably have had a dozen of those. This one was the most difficult to conquer, though. It looked like the cities by the river might have some problems with their traffic, as everything is built on a small strip of land. And what about floods and avalanches?

In Dresden we first looked for left luggage office and wondered about the hand-written signs towards it. It raised even more questions when we noticed that half of the place was reserved for instruments. We shortly found out that the place was for visitors of German Protestant Kirchentag, a church festival. The whole city seemed to be booked for this event. We finally found a place to leave our backpacks and decided that the architecture would not have been moved away because of the festival. We had to ask the police to find the tourist information. A few days outside Germany already showed in the language skills: the info guy instructed Tiiti where to find the main office, where they will speak other languages than German. Bah! A customer servant should not mock their clients' language skills!

The city seemed to have two kinds of restaurants: closed ones and those full of church festival attendees. We later found out that the reason for the former category was Father's Day -- some marketing! At least there were lots of booths selling sausages and stuff. After wasting a couple of hours we found a restaurant serving some overly salty Thai food.

We finally started our architecture overview at the German Hygiene Museum, which was naturally full of church festival attendees. The building is a combination of the historicist style and early Bauhaus influences. It is at the same time monumental, and plastered white and full of light. The church festival had placed its programme for children nearby, and Tiiti mixed right in with the round belly.

We went to the main tourist information to ask some out of the ordinary questions, which made the guy behind the counter struggle. Where do I find the transparent factory, state library, central department store? He had never heard of most of the buildings, which we had selected from Wikipedia. After surfing the said site for a while the boy managed to put most of the targets on our map. We had already visited one tourist information earlier, as we found a visiting one from Dessau and Lutherstadt Wittenberg, which happened to be our next destinations. There we had received a list of absolute must-sees from an overeager lady.

We shared a tram with all the festival attendees to the Volkswagen factory and dropped by Joe's Sport Bar to quench our thirst. While Tiiti was using the ladies' room, Timo found himself in a charming German conversation with a local guy: 'Who are you, dude?' 'I'm sorry, my German is not so good.' 'Whatcha doin' here?' 'Could you speak slower, please?' and so on, with neither understanding each other. Soon another local seemed like he would like to start a fight with the foreigner. For the future tourists we warmly recommend the toilets and taps at the transparent factory instead of this bar.

The factory was, you guessed it, transparent. Were it not a public holiday, we could probably have seen cars being built. We concentrated on the architecture instead of the cars. The visitor areas had nicely organic shapes, and apparently the same was true of the offices. The lobby was four storeys high and decorated with white and light wood. The factory side looked extremely clean with no greasy machines. In the middle of the lobby stood a two-floor tall black sphere, apparently some kind of an auditorium or theatre, and the shiny surface underneath it proved to be water. People often object to building big factories in the middle of the city, but this one only made the neighbourhood more beautiful. There was also a cosy-looking restaurant outside, probably as expensive as you would expect.

We took the tram to see some historicist building, probably a state bureau, which was monumental but also ugly. For some reason both historicist and historic buildings often come across as dirty -- is it because of the dirty-grey building material or just ordinary dirt? The building next door was worth taking a look, though it was just another unnamed house. On our way back we walked past The New Synagogue, which repeated the ideal of ugliness. It was modern, indeed, being slanted and twisted in all possible ways, but the modernism of 1920s is just more beautiful.

The UFA-palast is a large cinema complex built in the deconstructive style, which makes it structurally diverse. To get a better view we took the lift to the top floor and realised that we were trapped on a small deck of a few square meters. The only door led into a maintenance room and the lift was busy serving the floors that were actually in use. We did get our view, but it looked like the building mostly has concrete blocks sticking out in random directions and a slanted glass coating. The building would probably have looked a lot nicer, had the concrete been covered somehow. 1920s is still in the lead.

It was getting late and we decided to travel far enough from the church festival to find a free room in the inn, and on the other hand, close enough to our next destinations. The train was populated by festival attendees and a drunk gang of guys, who annoyed everyone with their noise, having a megaphone and all, shouting obscenities. There was no conductor available and none of the locals interfered. Apparently some team had won something, but we never found out which one and in what sport. The train did stop at Riesa, which means 'Nuisance' in Finnish, but they still didn't get off.

We randomly got off the train in Wurzen, a couple of stops before Leipzig, with hopes of finding a cheap place to spend the night in. Timo tried to ask a local girl for a hotel, but since the attempts to explain failed, she walked us there. The hotel was full, but after some desperate doorbell-ringing we found a room in the nearby pensionat. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and had insanely hot blankets, but at least we had a bed.

Friday, June 3 -- Luther's hoods

The only other guests having breakfast were a couple of bicyclists and a traveling salesman of some kind. We had been told that the room costs 60 euros. Tiiti only had a fifty euro note, and when she said that the husband will pay the rest, she heard that it was already enough. We took the morning train just as planned and found out that the pensionat was located right next to the station. We had just unluckily chosen the wrong road out of the two possibilities.

The tunnel beneath the Dessau railway station has signs [← Bauhaus], [City →]. The station itself was already beautiful, and later we found out it belongs to the Bauhaus architecture. Actually, the station had just been renovated, and everything up to the last detail was done according to the Bauhaus spirit. The next day Timo told that it was totally worth paying the 50 cents to visit such a neat toilet. That is, after all, a pretty cheap architecture tour.

The tourist information was in the centre instead of the station area, and those 1,3 kilometers were somewhat demanding, since we still had our backpacks. We asked for a room for at most 60 euros per night, and were first offered something too expensive. When we denied the offer, suddenly she found a pensionat for the price we had hoped for. We used the tram to drop our luggage to the pensionat and get back to the station.

Lutherstadt Wittenberg had less church festival attendees than Dresden, but their green scarfs could not be avoided. We drifted through the Unesco sites, but they were mostly remarkable for their history, which had left long ago. This was the church where Luther held his sermons, he lived here, to this door (or the original one, this is a copy) he nailed the theses. The town was pretty, but we had already seen a few pretty, historical towns and were not as impressed as we could've been. We also skipped all Luther-themed tourist kitsch.

The tourist maps had a recommended walking route, which would take the eager tourist through everything remarkable, which was not much more than a kilometre in this small town. We rebelliously forgot the route and went to have lunch. Timo craved some fish and found it, but the rice ended up being more tasty than the pieces of fish. They also almost forgot to bring our drinks. We rudely left no tip.

Naturally there was also something more interesting than the historical part: modern architecture. A bewildering architect called Friedensreich Hundertwasser had redesigned a concrete school built during the DDR. The result is perplexing, and there were even trees growing out of the windows. We never found out whether the trees were part of Hundertwasser's plans or if they were just a school project. The building has enough details just on the outside to use a whole day looking at, and pricey tours inside are also organised. On the other hand the building actually works as a school and the schoolkids sit in there every day and probably don't notice anything after a while. Some kid had even broken some of the decorations outside, how distasteful. Other children were playing capture the flag without thinking about their surroundings.

The weather was getting hotter all the time, so our topmost desire during the walk back was some ice cream. Germany has some kind of a siesta on the afternoon, so we didn't get any. Timo remarked that many people would find walking several kilometers, especially in the heat, unthinkable even without being pregnant. We finally found the most delicious ice creams ever at a parlor in the tourist area. Even Timo admitted that he would buy this mint instead of his usual salmiakki, if it was available in Finland.

We accidentally almost missed a Unesco site, but noticed it on the map. It was another one of Luther's churches. The more interesting site, a museum about the everyday life in the DDR, we did miss since it had been closed while we were doing all the walking. The museum of watch the grass grow was still open, and we spent a while napping there while we waited for our train. The napping continued back home in the pensionat. We tried to come up with a schedule for tomorrow, since there would two different Unesco world heritage sites to go to: Bauhaus in Dessau and a Garden Kingdom in Wörlitz.

For once the grocery store was easy to spot, and this allowed us to buy some delicious German bread rolls for supper. Tiiti had half a kilo of quark and instantly got enough protein for the day. Surprisingly she had no room for the rolls after that. We had a short walk to a bridge over the nearby river Mulde and discussed our trip so far. Have we been slow enough, is it starting to be too taxing, are we relaxing or accomplishing. We had both had some odd prejudices on what a pregnant traveler is able and allowed to do, mostly when it comes to carrying a heavy backpack and walking longish distances.

Saturday, June 4 -- Bauhaus on the Bicycle

We rushed to have breakfast as soon as we were allowed, and continued to rent some bicycles from the pensionat. They rolled surprisingly smoothly, considering how heavy they seemed to carry. We made it to the station at 9:14, while the train to Wörlitz was supposed to leave at 9:15 towards the Garden Kingdom. Well, it would leave at that time. In two weeks. The friendly guy at the public transpormation information told us that a part of the kingdom can also be found in Dessau. We decided to see that and the Bauhaus today, with the bicycles and all.

Bicycling was fun. We rode to the Bauhaus headquarters to see the ticket prices and continued right on to the Meisterhauses. We saw them first from the outside and the from the inside, since the ticket office was in the furthermost building. These three houses are pretty much identical on the outside, and contain six identical apartments. The most interesting detail about the interior design was the use of colour, since more than a hundred shades of colour had been utilised. The three-coloured cupboard didn't bother the usually colour-hating Timo, even though it looked like the Rumanian flag. We took photos of everything, such as door handles, but saw someone using even more memory card space than us.

These houses had been built for the master teachers of the Bauhaus school, and now contained work from the artists who had lived in them, mostly paintings. Some apartments had Bauhaus and architecture themed works from young photographers, making us wonder why they were great and our photos were just ordinary. Nazis had closed the Bauhaus school in 1933, after which these houses were inhabited by workers from the Junkers airplane factory. The nazis disliked the modern look of these houses and removed the large windows and made other modifications. This was shown by a set of interesting scale models showing the houses in 1928, '35, and '75.

The part of the world heritage garden kingdom in Dessau was a weird thicket with some random statues, forts, and pavillions sticking out of the ground every here and there. They hadn't even removed the nettles. It looked like the zone from Tarkovsky's Stalker movie: your usual forest with some artefacts from a weird civilization. We were not very fond of this, which meant it was lunch time. We tried to find a restaurant in the big shopping mall in the centre, but had no luck. Where do the locals eat? We finally found 'The first potato house of Dessau' near a big marketplace, which sold asparagus and salted fish with the potatoes. On some trips we have missed the Finnish potato foods, but in Germany this was not a problem. The potato house had the fastest service and the darkest beer during the whole trip.

The Bauhaus school headquarters were quite a disappointment: lots of glass and school-like corridors. The railings were the only curved thing. The exhibition on the archeology of architecture was interesting, but the technical terms in German caused some trouble: what methods had been used to find out the original colors of the walls, et cetera. The building had been a school during the DDR era, was declared a monument of the city in the 60s, a monument of DDR in the 70s, and a UNESCO world heritage site in 1996. At some point it had occurred to someone that it should be renovated a bit. The bookstore had so many interesting books on architecture and design that we just have to pay a visit to the corresponding department in our local library.

We continued on a scenery/Bauhaus route to the bank of Elbe. A restaurant with an interesting form was marked as a Bauhaus item. We would have had an ice cream there, but it was reserved for a wedding. We rode past some allotment gardens and through forests to a long bridge with a school of big fish swimming underneath it. After long journeys in the middle of fields we crossed the bridge from yesterday to get back home. The route was very placid, and there were a lot of cyclists and services for them. We bought some provisions for the long trip tomorrow and some supper. While looking for the kitchen we got frightened by a group of half-naked Poles, but they wished us welcome. We had something to cook in the microwave, but they were boiling real sausages in a kettle. The evening was insanely hot, around 30 degrees.

After the supper we utilised the bikes one more time by riding to Siedlung Törten, a whole suburb full of Bauhaus. They were planning to turn the Konsum house into a tourist information, but now it served us only by providing a map with the most interesting buildings in the area. It seemed like the area was inhabited by ordinary people, which is the way it should be. Many houses had some extra additions, like a canopy on the door. Some had been plastered brown. One of the special buildings was hidden in such a forest that Unesco should send a guy with a chainsaw there. Whoever designed the area in the 1920s didn't take into account that a kilometre-long straight will tempt people to test the acceleration of their Porsches. The modern engineer had not fixed this with any speed bumps, either.

After a cold shower we tried to get some sleep. Why do we always end up in the hottest penthouse?

Next stop: Denmark.

Leave the train.