On Sunday evening, when we arrived in Dresden, we were setting up the internet in our hotel room when somehow, serendipitously, I must have accidentally opened an app on my phone that tells me what bands are playing nearby. (This app is of limited value in Lansing, Michigan, but I live in hope.) Anyway, as it opened, the app recognized that we were in Dresden and brought up the upcoming concerts in town … which included the Arcade Fire. On Tuesday. In Dresden. And it wasn’t sold out.

Monday morning I found the ticket office and handed them rather a lot of Euros in exchange for tickets. Tuesday evening, Dan and I headed to the Junge Garde, a large-ish outdoor venue in Dresden’s equivalent to Central Park. We got there in the middle of the opening act, Owen Pallett, a violinist (who also plays with Arcade Fire) who does some really cool things with multitracking. Between the opening act and AF there was a DJ who turned out to be Steve Mackey from Pulp (which explained why AF started singing Pulp’s Common People at one point during the show [bonus Shatner link, just because]).

The concert was amazing. Arcade Fire put on a great, high-energy show. At one point during the concert there was a person dressed as a giant glitter disco ball standing in the middle of the audience with a bright light shining on him, reflecting (see what they did there?). Here’s the setlist they played; at the end, they shot massive confetti cannons into the air, completely covering the audience towards the front.

This was after about two-thirds of the confetti had settled!

Between the last song and the encore, people came out on stage wearing giant bobbleheads, with one of the heads being a square video box with an image of David Bowie singing “Heroes” in German. Inexplicably hilarious.

The moral of the story is: sometimes, you go to Dresden and end up seeing the Arcade Fire.

Statistics:
Cigarettes smoked by the guy next to me: many

So, for the last nine years, most of the time when Leigh and I have traveled, it’s been because she has attended a conference, and I’ve come along for the ride. “What did you do today, honey?” I would ask, and she’d tell me she sat in a paper session on Lehrdal / Jackendoff theory or some such. “How about you?” she’d ask, and I’d breezily reply that I had climbed Mount Olympus.

Then she would stab me with a fork.

So needless to say, she was thrilled about the current situation. I won’t go into a lot of details, because no one cares, but here’s why we were in Dresden:

It’s a pretty big conference. I would estimate on the order of 2,000 or so physicists attended for talks with such exciting titles as “High Power Test Results of the SPARC C-Band Accelerating Structures,” “Development of a Low-Latency, High-precision, Intra-train Beam Feedback System Based on Cavity Beam Position Monitors,” and “Why is Women’s Football Less Popular?” (I am not making that last one up.)

The conference hall is immense:

Oh, and I was here completely on the dime of the U.S. taxpayer, since I presented two posters at the conference. So – thanks, U.S. taxpayers!

As Dan mentioned, it’s usually me who sits in conference rooms while he goes out to explore London/Leipzig/Thessaloniki/Jyväskylä/wherever. Leading up to the conference, I kept telling everyone how excited I was to be the one to get to wander around and do things while he was stuck in the conference. But when the prospect of being the one to go out and explore Dresden arrived … I wasn’t actually sure what to do. Luckily, Monday had a vague plan — I was going to find an ATM, I was going to find a place to get German SIM cards for our phones, and I was going to go get tickets to the Arcade Fire concert that we had just found out was happening in Dresden on Tuesday night. I just had no idea where I was going to do all those things. But things happened, and with money, SIM cards, and tickets acquired, I set off to see something about Dresden that didn’t have to do with trip administrivia.

The Altstadt, or Old Town, of Dresden is very interesting. It was pretty much bombed to bits during WWII, so a lot of it is a reconstruction. The most interesting bit of it is a historic church, the Frauenkirche, which was destroyed during the bombing and then just sort of left there as a memorial. (Seriously — apparently they just left the ruins right there and went, “Good enough.”) After reunification in 1989, there was enough outcry that they began the process of cataloging the remains and rebuilding the church, using as much original material as possible. There were two sides of the church that had remained partially standing, one of them being the side with the altar, and you can very clearly see the older bits in the exterior of the church.

Frauenkirche, exterior (altar side)

The interior of the church is also striking. It’s open to the public, and despite the no photography signs at the door, everyone takes lots of pictures and the ushers do nothing about it.

I at least tried to be inconspicuous and didn’t use a flash.

The other main thing in downtown Dresden is the Procession of Princes, or the Fürstenzug. It’s a giant mural depicting the various rulers of Saxony, originally painted in the 1870s. When paint on the exterior of a building proved not to be the most permanent solution, they replaced it with porcelain tiles in the early 1900s. (Porcelain is a big thing around here.) Fortunately, there was only minimal damage in the WWII bombing.

Beginning ….

… middle … (did I mention this thing is HUGE?) …

… end.

After that, I went back to collect Dan from the conference and we went to dinner at a Surrealist cafe called Stilbruch. We were clearly nowhere near hip enough to be at this cafe, but they served us anyway. We experienced our first currywurst, which is essentially a sausage cut into pieces and covered with what appears to be curry-spiced ketchup, served with fries. It appears to be the German thing to eat when drunk. It’s possible we weren’t drunk enough to fully appreciate it.

The cafe itself had lots of cool art installments throughout, including a game called “Gollard” that I forgot to take a picture of, so here’s a picture from the cafe’s website.

It’s a pool table lowered onto the ground, covered with artificial turf, and you hit the billiard balls with a golf club. The website goes into rather a lot of details about the rules of the game. It’s convoluted, but it still makes more sense than cricket.

And what Surrealist cafe would be complete without a Magritte homage?

Magritte is watching you eat.

Statistics:
SIM cards acquired: 2
SIM cards that actually worked: 1
Water that wasn’t for drinking that Dan actually drank: 1

Dan mentioned our hotel in downtown Prague. It had a lovely courtyard full of flowers that were just begging to have their picture taken. It couldn’t have been more impossibly quaint.

It also had an impossibly tiny door to our room. Picture includes me for scale (and remember that I’m not a giant):

Luggage stowed, we wandered around Prague, and I discovered the 360 Panoramic function on my phone’s camera.

We saw many things on our wander, including giant creepy baby sculptures.

I was really excited to have happened across these, because I’d read about them — they’re by an artist named David Cerny, and they had originally been installed on a television tower. And because they’re giant creepy babies, which quite honestly should be a good enough reason on its own.

We also came across the artistic inverse, which was a sculpture memorial to the victims of communism.

There was a plaque nearby that read: “The memorial to the victims of communism is dedicated to all victims, not only those who were jailed or executed but also those whose lives were ruined by totalitarian despotism.”

For the rest of the day we geocached, wandered around Prague, tried to take a funicular up a hill, abandoned that plan when it seemed as though everyone else had the same plan, and walked near the castle. (TO the castle will have to wait until we return after the conference in Dresden.) We also found the John Lennon wall.

Imagine all the graffiti.

Statistics:
Creepy baby sculptures: 3
Geocaches claiming to be the most-found geocaches in the world: 2
Train delay from Prague to Dresden: 45 minutes. No, 35. No, 30. No, 35. No, 40. Wait, it’s here.

Having survived jet lag and a really uncomfortable hotel mattress, we were ready to go out and see the Europe. Specifically the Czech Republic portion of the Europe. We set out relatively early to walk around the city before the crowds got too bad, and maybe find a few more geocaches. (As noted in our previous post, we had already cached our first Czech)

Leigh had found us a wonderful hotel just steps from both the main downtown square and the Charles Bridge. So we headed off to see the former when it wasn’t full of hippies, jugglers, mountebanks and ne’erdowells.

The number one touristy thing to look at in the main square is the astronomical clock. It’s a pretty amazing thing, and I’m resisting the urge to look it up on Wikipedia until I’ve written about it. Near as we can figure it has a Sun hand, a Moon hand, a Day of the Year hand with a dial that actually includes a spot for each day of the year, and other wackiness. We could not, however, figure out how to actually tell TIME by the silly thing.

There was also a small square with a fountain in it that we walked through about four times in our 20 hours in Prague. We eventually realized that it contained one of the two most visited geocaches in the world, with over 16,000 finds. The statue has an interesting back story as well.

After that we walked back over the Charles bridge. This is a bridge that was built approximately the same time that Isabella started bugging Ferdinand to get those boats out of the driveway. It’s an huge piece of masonry, and you can stand on it and picture the medieval oxcarts jostling their way across. Or at least, you can picture it for approximately 8 seconds, and then someone will try to get you to buy a souvenir, pay them to draw your picture, ask you to take their picture, or steal your camera.

Directly under the bridge is the OTHER of the two most found geocaches in the world.  Also over 16,000 finds.

From there we had a nice little wander around the west side of the river. We didn’t have time for any of the major sites, but we found some creepy baby sculptures in a park and generally goggled at things.

By 1 we had to return to our hotel to get our things for the trip to Dresden. Which was late. But we made it to our hotel without incident, where my conference reception was already underway. Leigh hadn’t paid for a ticket, but I gave her my beer and some sausages and she seemed happy.

Train Rides: 1
Tram Rides: 1
Subway Lines: 2
Geocaches Found: 5
John Lennon Images Found: At least 4

It hadn’t occurred to me when I booked our plane flights to Prague that we were leaving on a Friday the 13th. Dan is completely dismissive of such superstitions, and I generally don’t lend them very much credence myself. However, the lore surrounding that date may help explain the travel shenanigans we encountered on the outbound voyage.

For whatever reason, our Delta flight had us going from Flint -> Atlanta, Atlanta -> JFK, then JFK -> Prague. Whatever, airline gods — we can deal with your complete lack of direction as long as you are getting us to Prague eventually. Fine.

Except.

The actual sequence of events doesn’t much matter — suffice to say that the Atlanta to JFK leg of that trip did not go to plan. Needless to say, we missed our connection in JFK, and had to be rebooked via Amsterdam, which added six hours to our (already long) trip.

So we arrived into Prague around 4:30 pm, about six hours later than we intended, completely drained — and with all of our electronics also almost completely drained (of battery). But we wanted to stay up to try to defeat the jetlag, and to spend what time we had remaining in Prague, so we ventured out without cameras.

We went to a lovely sausage house / beer hall called Lokal, where you can have any beer you want as long as it’s Pilsner Urquell. But you can have a LOT of them. Seriously, there’s a guy whose job it is to walk around with a tray full of beers, and they just keep giving them to you unless you catch them and tell them not to. Then five minutes later they will try again, and look at you funny when you turn them down again. They obviously expect you to have a lot of beers, because they count how many you have had by marking off icons on a small sheet that they leave on your table. Here’s a picture of the sheet, which I stole er, borrowed for documentation purposes:

I feel slightly ashamed that I was only able to knock off one of those beer icons, since they clearly were expecting far more out of me.

We started walking back to our hotel, and happened to come across throngs of people milling about in a neighborhood. We realized that it was a huge special event called Museum Night — museums all across Prague were open from 7 pm until 1 am, and there were free buses shuttling you from one museum-ridden area to the next. We did a quick survey of the museums on offer and realized we were close to the Smetana museum, so we headed down there. There was a concert just about to start when we arrived, so it was packed and HOT. We looked at a few exhibits (I know nothing about Smetana, by the way) and decided it was too stuffy to stay for the concert. We pressed on, our next museum destination (the Czech Museum of Music) determined by a flyer Dan picked up with a picture of a quarter-tone piano built by August Förster, the company who made our (decidedly and disappointingly tonal) grand piano.

This museum also had live music in the atrium, which meant that we were free to walk through the exhibits. Lots of fabulous old instruments, including four things called sediphones, which Dan decided he wanted. The quarter-tone piano did not disappoint; it looked wacky (picture forthcoming from the brochure) and sounded even wackier; the museum had listening stations where you could listen to the different instruments being played. Dan had to pull me away from that one, as well as from the station with the recordings of the mechanical instruments.

More wandering ensued, and we wanted to go to more museums, but at that point we were exhausted. We walked back across the Charles Bridge (more about that in tomorrow’s post), returned to our hotel in Staré Mesto (old town), and collapsed. More Prague adventures tomorrow.

Statistics:
Flights: 4 (one more than intended)
Movies on flight: 1 (Muppets Most Wanted)
Sausages: 3
Beer: 1
Geocaches found: 4
Language fail: all of them. Czech is impenetrable.