Dresden, sandstone and river air

We pulled into Dresden-Neustadt before the Hbf, which I'd half-forgotten was a stop, so for a cheerful half-minute Marc had his bag over his shoulder and was halfway to the door before I caught him by the sleeve. EC 171, the Hungaria, the one that carries on to Bad Schandau and Prague after we got off. It had brought us down from Berlin in a bit under two hours, 166 kilometres of flat sandy nothing-much that I mostly slept through. The Czech-run Speisewagen was open the whole way and I had a coffee in it out of pure principle. I even cleared the morning's mails from the table, off the phone hotspot. A proper dining car on a weekday morning is rare enough now.

Out at the proper Hbf the platform halls were the first thing. The Foster membrane roof had been a building site on and off for years, but they finished the renewal by late 2024: taut and white, stretched over the old iron like skin over a drum, the historic ironwork kept and skinned new. Apparently the wave shape is meant to echo the Elbe. I couldn't see the river in it, but I'll take the story. Light came through in a flat, milky way that made everyone on the Perron look healthier than they were.

It is not a two-minute walk to the old town, whatever the maps imply when you squint. It's a good fifteen, twenty minutes across the Altstadt, and we did it on foot with the wind coming off the river, because the April average here is about fourteen degrees and that morning we were nowhere near it. A light jacket, and then a regretted decision to leave the second layer in the bag. Eventually we will learn, the both of us.

The honey-and-soot church

What nobody quite prepares you for about the Frauenkirche is how blotchy it is, and I mean that as praise. They salvaged something like eight and a half thousand of the original stones from the ruin and set them back into the new sandstone, so the whole facade is mottled: fire-darkened blocks scattered through the pale new ones like raisins in a loaf, every old block set back in its place. It was reconsecrated in 2005, a year ahead of schedule and before the city's 800th birthday, and it's Lutheran, which I hadn't expected and which makes the plainness inside make sense.

We sat outside it on the Neumarkt with cake at the Coselpalais, right at the foot of the church, and I had a coffee and a slice of something I can no longer name because Marc ate half of it. The place opens daily at eleven and we were among the first in, which is the only civilised time to be anywhere with a famous view, or?

Weathered Elbe sandstone goes dark and sooty with age, which is why none of this city is the gleaming pale you're sold on postcards. Honey in the new bits, soot in the old. I find the soot more honest.

Brühl's Terrace, the so-called Balcony of Europe, runs high along the Elbe above the Altstadt, and we walked the length of it with the river wide and grey below. The Zwinger after that: Pöppelmann's Baroque pile, the same sandstone, the Permoser figures up on the gateways looking faintly bored, and then Theaterplatz with the Semperoper sitting heavy on one side. Both buildings share the stone, so the square came out uneven, dark where the weather had got at it, pale where it hadn't.

I'll admit the Zwinger is a touch much for me. Beautiful, yes, but it's a lot of curlicue at once, and after twenty minutes I wanted a plain wall to look at, which is a preference, not a complaint. We went inside it anyway, to the Gemäldegalerie that fills one wing, mostly for a single painting. Raphael's Sistine Madonna hangs there, big and solemn, and the quiet joke of the room is that almost nobody looks at the Madonna. Everyone drifts down to the very bottom edge, where two small winged boys lean on the frame with their chins on their hands, wearing the exact expression of children kept too long somewhere dull. You have seen them; they are on every mug and tea towel in the shop below. I didn't buy the umbrella, and given the afternoon I should have. We got rained on for the eight minutes it took to cross back, and the sandstone went a shade darker where it was wet.

We caught a later train back from the Hbf, under the white roof, the light through it already thinning toward dusk. Marc had a bag of Stollen he'd bought out of season for reasons he couldn't explain, and ate it on the train while I took the window. Bad Schandau, Prague: the Hungaria carries on without us this time.

— Tobi