rob chats in 2012

best parts of Dresden - old and new (or vice versa)

2012-02-20T23:36:00.003Z

The two best parts of Dresden are the Neustadt (new town) which is actually the old town, and the Altstadt (old town) which is actually the new town ...

Neustadt

Neustadt is across the river from the Altstadt and mostly survived the annihilation that the city experienced during the wartime bombings, thus making it actually older than Dresden's centre, the old town.

The buildings in Neustadt are fantastic – a lot like the architecture found in the centre of Vienna but with old unrenovated buildings mixed with 'done up' buildings; Neustadt is the alternative, hippie and funky part of Dresden. Full of life, colour, and party. Everywhere you look is a feast for the eyes.

Altstadt

Altstadt (the centre) was totally bombed during WWII and has been restored to its pre-war glory. The centre is beautiful but ironically the buildings are newly built replicas or restorations of what once was. The old town is touristy and expensive but also peaceful and quiet. This is in stark contrast to the hustle and bustle of the Neustadt.

Around the Altstadt you can find big glass department store buildings, franchises and chains. The Neustadt in comparison has all the bohemian shops and independent stores offering discounts.

The two parts are connected in the middle by schicki-micki Königstraβe (King street) and its surrounding small and swish cobbled streets. Königstraβe leads from Neustadt to the Elbe river and its parks. Over the river you enter the Altstadt.

I’m doing my best to find a flat somewhere in the middle of these two best parts of Dresden :-)

discovering dresden

2012-02-15T20:16:00.000Z

Well I survived the motorway mayhem. Thanks for asking! LOL

I arrived in Dresden late Friday after my trip in Upper Austria and Styria.

I am staying in the flat of a friend of Stephanie's (thanks Steph!!) and the lady whose flat it is and the flat itself are really nice.

I have already had some interesting experiences here in Dresden since my arrival on Friday:

My faithful MG managed to get me from England, through France, Holland, Belgium and Austria to Germany without winter tyres, but I only think it managed it because of the weight of everything inside pushing it to the ground :P

However, I managed to get some much needed winter tyres at a bargain price from the Czech Republic on Monday thanks to help from Klara and her dad. I have also discovered that in Germany they charge to check your car if you take it to a garage before they propose what might need doing to it. What a cheek!

I have also been on a mission to find a flat for myself from April, internet for now and also to get a bank account and a German sim card.

To get a flat I need a bank account but to get a bank account I need an abode. Hmm. Nevertheless, there are loads of places available so I am hopeful.

To get a German sim card I need a bank account to pay the bill (even pay as you go) and to get a bank account I need an abode. Hmm

To get the internet I also need a bank account so I asked my neighbours if they would let me use their WiFi. They were a bit apprehensive for fear of me giving them a virus. i didn't have the heart to go into detail about how I can't give them a virus by just using their WiFi connection (unless I am very good at hacking which I'm not) but in the end (today) they agreed, but they also asked me to sign a handwritten contract that I will be financially responsible for any viruses they get. Ha ha

It reminds me of when I was living in Germany last time years ago and I put a bag of rubbish into the bin at the train station. A week later I got a letter from the council saying that the bins at the train station are not for general rubbish. They must have searched through my rubbish to get my address!

There have been tonnes of police cars/vans around and I found out that it is because on Monday there were 13,000 people who joined hands in the centre to form a chain in remembrance of the first day that the bombs fell on the city during WWII.

The reason that the police were out in force is because last year the Neo Nazis came out to throw stones at the peaceful 'human chain'. I didn't realise that there were so many Neo Nazis in Dresden. I knew there were loads in Magdeburg because i drove through the Nazi ghetto once when I went to the Love Parade in Berlin, but anyway. Interesting stuff!

East German politeness is interesting too. If you walk in a shop and don't close the door straight away, they look at you and call out "door", for example. Ha ha

It might all sound like a difficult place to be but actually everything is going well and the people and city have both been very nice to me so far. The city is also really pretty with parks, nice big river and lovely centre.

So I have the internet now if you need (or want!!) to email me :-)

The next things I need to sort out are bank account and sim card.

Greetings to all from Deutschland!

Robert xxxxx

PS - no pics right now but hopefully next time

stranded in snow

2012-02-07T14:58:00.006Z

Another crazy day. I woke up today and it was -18 Celsius with a strong wind (I don’t think it quite qualified as a snow storm – that was in the east of Austria!). I then had to drive through some mountains to get to a school for some demonstration lessons. That was a little hairy and I can’t say I enjoyed it much because the snow ploughs hadn’t been out for a while, but that was just the beginning.

After the demos, I was supposed to go to 4 or 5 more schools but it turned out that the only way to these schools was back through another set of mountains. This time the snow was much worse and even with my winter tyres, I was slipping around the corners. Still, I was going at a steady pace.

That was until I started going up from 1000 metres to 2000 metres and I came across a lorry stuck in the middle of the road blocking the way completely. I saw that the back of the lorry had an Irish number plate so, since I couldn’t pass, I got out the car and walked to the lorry to see if the driver needed any help.

It turned out the cabin of the lorry was actually Hungarian and the poor driver couldn’t speak English or German (I say poor, but Austrians later told me that he shouldn’t be on these roads. Lorries should be on the motorway but try to take shortcuts to save money).

I then got back in my car only to find that because I had stopped, my car wouldn’t drive up the mountain anymore. I was stuck.

OK. So I started to reverse back down hill and then managed to turn my car around. Next I drove thankfully back down to the first village and stopped there for some lunch. This is when the Austrians inside the guest house told me that the lorries shouldn’t be driving up there, and they also said that because the winter this year is so extreme, all the snow ploughs are busy keeping the towns and motorways drivable.

After about 2 hours the lorry driver had managed to put some snow chains on his wheels and reverse back down the mountain too. He made a turn and headed back to town. At this point it was too late to get to the schools and I didn’t really fancy trying anyway, so instead I decided to head back to town too, and take the long way round on the motorway to my hotel for tonight.

I’m not finished yet! I got on the motorway okay and everything was going fine for about half an hour. THEN there was a sudden traffic jam. All the cars moved to the very edge of the road leaving a clear path through the centre (no, I didn’t decide to drive straight down the middle! - though perhaps I thought about it for a second or two :P)

I then realised that in Austria they must do this to allow the emergency services to get to the front of the traffic jam. I am guessing that there must have been an accident.

I don’t know what has happened though because I have been sitting in this traffic jam now for 30 minutes and there is no sign of movement and no sign of the emergency services so I guess I will be here for a good while longer yet ...

randy rob roams again!

2012-02-06T17:13:00.005Z

Welcome to Rob’s Rantings – 2012. Yes, the blog is back because once again I am on another adventure. This time I am moving to Dresden in Germany, and once again the move is indefinite. Will I move for a whole year like Spain, or perhaps even longer? – only here can you find the answer :P

When I last wrote my blog, family and friends followed my exploits with interest. I hope you will find my exploits this time just as interesting.

And as you know, a lot has changed since my last post. I moved to Canterbury after Spain to take on a completely new role as a Promotions and Sales Officer for the English courses I had been teaching, my divorce came through, and of course I met gorgeous Klara thanks to my first ever trip promoting English courses at a conference in Klara’s university north of Prague.

Yes, my experiences have been vast and my adventures many. I have made some amazing new friends along the way like AnnaMarija from the beautiful island of Pag in Croatia, and Victoria in the city of Linz in Austria, and not to forget Roswitha, my second mum, from Burgenland in Austria who has guided me and given me advice, some of which I have listened to, and some of which I have ignored like any respectable 'son' should. ;-)

In Canterbury I got to meet my (now) ex-housemate, Nick, whose Xbox skills I will miss greatly, and of course new colleagues at work, some of whom inevitably became good friends too. My brill boss Paul and chatty Trev. Steph should get a special mention because I have a lot to thank her for.

There are more people through the power of amazing Couchsurfing too, and Paola from Columbia and Olga from Russia are amazing people - just to mention two.

Sorry I can't mention everyone, but I do need to mention Simon and Julie from back home in Robin Hood country because I'm glad that we were all reunited for drinks, and I really am glad for the serious bonding time I was able to have with my family while living back in the UK.

I even had time to go on holiday with Klara to my favourite cities in Spain and Morocco, as well as on a ferry adventure to Bruges in Belgium.

Yes, it has been eventful, but it has not all been easy. I moved to Canterbury in June 2010 to base myself back in the UK and build a life there, and I tried hard, especially in the first few months, but after more than a year and a half living there, I ended up knowing almost no one locally, and had very little social life to show for my time there. One reason was because I was travelling so much that several weeks a month I wasn’t even home and when I was home, I was absolutely shattered and staying in the house was all I could muster.

Another thing that was hard was that I spent A LOT of the travelling time alone. I have certainly learnt to enjoy my alone time, which was actually one of my goals when I took this type of travelling job because, as you know, I have never been very good at being on my own. But there is also such a thing as too much alone time. I was talking to myself (which I always have done) but I mean A LOT because I was so often my own company. Think of that Tom Hanks film where the football becomes his best friend. You do go a bit stir crazy spending long periods of time without your healthy non-work related social contact.

In the end though, the reason that I came to making the move again right now at this particular time was actually brought about by an unexpected event at work that I wont go into now, but suffice to say that it all worked out in the end and I will now be a freelance consultant (ooh! sounds so posh) for the company, working one week a month abroad (like before) and one week a month visiting schools commutable from Dresden where I will live.

I am now already on this new adventure and already experiencing more of the unexpected:

I left England in my UK car (thanks Keith for such an invaluable present) late last Saturday the 4th February. I took the ferry by car (now for the 4th time - just think that's a cool little fact) and arrived in Dunkirk. It had started snowing in England just as I was driving to the ferry. When I arrived in France it was covered in snow, which was bad enough, but driving into Belgium, there was a full on blizzard! I don’t know how cold it was exactly but my car was iced over both inside and out! - and the car heating made no difference. It was a suicidal journey into Holland where the snow started to relent a bit, and thankfully by the time I made it to Germany, the roads were only covered in frost. I say ‘only’ but it was still pretty crazy. I decided to drive all the way to Linz where I rented a car for a week’s work visiting schools in Upper Austria and left my own car at the car rental company.

That was yesterday. I then drove the car to a place called Bad Ischl where my first school visits were today. My hotel was in a beautiful village called Perneck just outside Bad Ischl and slightly higher in the mountains. When I woke up today it was -18 Celsius!! The last time I experienced such cold weather was in Russia! Ok, that was a bit colder (-30 degrees). Making my way through some meter-high snow in Austria today would have been scarier than driving though Belgium the other day if it were not for the fact that my rental car is a brand new powerful Opel (Vauxhall) able to drive an amazing 200+ kph and equipped with the all-essential winter tyres that one needs to survive snowy roads. Tyres which, ridiculously, people in the UK were not even told existed until the ‘big freeze’ of last winter.

The views of the mountains were absolutely amazing though. I didn’t manage to take a picture of the best view, which was a snow-covered mountain landscape with blankets of green Christmas fir trees which in turn had large pieces of snow on them and made it look like the trees were covered in twinkling stars.

Where I am today, the temperature doesn't usually fall below -5 in winter. It seems like climate change has brought us a different winter experience this year. I heard that snow has been falling in England now too?

Over at this side of the pond it has certainly been a crazy couple of days, and the weather forecast for the east of Austria tonight is that a winter snow storm is on the way!

Let’s hope there is another climate change called the ‘big melt’ before Friday. That is the day that I will be driving my trusty MG ZR+, full to the absolute brim with stuff, the final 8 hour stretch to Dresden.

Wish me luck! :-)

Austria Today

My Rental Car