Orange Rage. Orage?

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Tuesday was easier on the feet: a whirlwind journey by car to three distinctive castles in Saxony.

First, we drove to Festung Königstein (literally, "King's stone fortress"), which does what it says on the tin: it's a fortress on top of a huge rock overlooking the Elbe River, a place where the King and court and pretty much most of Dresden, there's room, could retreat for safety in wartime. The natural fortifications mean if they don't want you in, you ain't gettin' in (maybe a clever disguise, but that's hard to scale up to an entire army once people caught onto the Trojan Horse thing), and it had its own secure water supply, so even a siege was going to be challenging. Today, hordes of marauding tourists invade via a totally safe but rather terrifying modern glass elevator hung off the side of one of the rock faces.

On the drive to Königstein, we and everybody else on the road were terrorized by a seemingly endless caravan of quirky Dutch vehicles: NL plates, parts prominently painted orange, packed full of yelling blond dudes leaning and waving out their windows and occasionally jumping out at stoplights to photograph themselves; one had functioning police lights and a siren and actually prompted the other cars on the road to pull over and let it pass, and one minivan which cut in directly ahead of us at a merge had a music system with large, powerful speakers aimed directly off its back tailgate into our windshield, blaring insufferable anonymous trashy faux-folk/pop. We have no idea what the fuck their point was. (No indication of any World Cup connection.) The first five minutes were quirky and fun, but during the remaining 30-45 (or more? it seemed like more) I gradually developed what I believe may be an enduring hatred for the Dutch, and also the color orange. When they finally took a different spoke off a roundabout and seemed to drive away, we cheered, but it didn't end there. From the top of Königstein (a huge table rock), we could hear the horns, sirens, and music off and on again for hours. Either there were multiple caravans, or the one caravan was circling. I really was offended and enraged by the entire spectacle: it felt like the Dutch in the caravan were treating Saxony (former East Germany) as some ghetto they could hipster/slum around in, and dehumanizing Saxons (us!) into props to be used for their own entertainment. The same vein as those vile stag parties and pub crawls by north/western Europeans in beautiful eastern capitals—places that deserve to be respected, not degraded. But their economies are struggling, so they're cheap to party in and flaunt privilege in. On the other hand, Germans (probably even Saxons) are more often on the privileged side of that equation. (Ugly Americans don't factor into Euro stag culture because cheap RyanAir flights don't get our boys over there.)

But I digress.

From Königstein, we drove down to something completely different: Schloß Pillnitz, a "pleasure palace" on the banks of the Elbe, just a short cruise from Dresden city, whose beautiful Baroque buildings are decorated in something called Chinoiserie: basically, "we have no idea what the real Orient looks like, but based on the knickknacks travelers bring back from there, we're guessing it's something like this". Pillnitz also features extensive beautiful gardens, with very many tropical plants in giant pots on top of wooden pallets so they can be forklifted back into their greenhouse for the winter, and a mind-boggling 230-year-old, 30-foot-tall camellia tree whose 43-foot-tall, 54-ton greenhouse sits on rails and rolls around the tree and back off again with the seasons. For real.

Finally, we drove to yet another castle, the Lingnerschloß, with its incredibly scenic Lingnerterrasse. I didn't learn anything special about this castle. I'm certain Dieter must have made a fine effort to share details, but my brain was full and fuel tank empty. We stopped at its Biergarten for "a coffee", which yesterday we took literally (we had coffee in the Royal Palace between museums), but today we were hungry and went straight for, basically, lunch. They had a kiosk serving freshly grilled steak. Steak! For 4€! I almost gleefully ordered one for Greg, who had entrusted me to find him "a snack", and ordered a Weißwurst for myself. I have no idea whether I was following Dieter's lead or he was following mine, but he ordered the same. I got Greg a giant Radler, and inquired very carefully in my very bad German about something on the menu called a "Potsdamer". The proprietors of the Biergarten themselves had no idea what it was! I pointed: "Radler, Diesel, Potsdamer. Was ist Potsdamer?" Some discussion behind the counter. It was eventually resolved that a Potsdamer is a Radler made with raspberry lemonade. Sold! I ordered a large one. Pink, sweet Bier. A delicious abomination. I am not sorry.

On subsequent days we ended up doing the same thing: stopping for "a coffee" which really meant "lunch". This helped ease our anxiety when facing long days of sightseeing with, though fortified by a nice breakfast, no mention of any plan for lunch. I don't know whether the lunchiness was their plan the whole time, or they just politely went along when Greg and I asserted it. Do they have lunch in Saxony??

Finally, from the Lingnerschloß, Dieter drove us to the top of the Standseilbahn, a funicular railway leading scenically and historically down the mountainside to the Elbe. Gudrun hopped out to ride it down with us, and Dieter drove around to pick us up at the bottom: the same drill we did with Laura in 2008 and still a beautiful and fun little trip.

As part of the aforementioned laptop catastrophe, on the drive home we made a quick stop at Conrad Electronics, also known as the Happiest Place on Earth judging by Dieter's reaction to it. More on this in a later post! And finally, we headed home for steaks (pork steaks) on the grill (electric grill) on our hosts' terrace. We survived another day, and the only orange thing I killed or injured today was a chilli-marinated pork steak!

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Comments

[J&J]

Noise
Intrusive noise spoiling it for the tourist! How rude!