Festing and Jesting in Dresden

The first indication that I had arrived in Dresden on an…abnormal weekend revealed itself upon my visit to the hostel. Using last year’s LG guide to my advantage, I decided to cut any searching and head straight for the hostel with the best review. Unfortunately, when I arrived, the phrase that greeted me was, “Schon ausgebucht,” which unfortunately doesn’t mean “filled with beautiful books,” rather, the more ominous, “already completely booked.” The landlady explained to me kindly that this weekend in the Neustadt (Dresden’s cheaper, less picturesque, north-bank neighborhood, named “new town” for the fact that it had to be reconstructed after a 17th-century fire before American firebombs had been invented) was the date of one of the biggest street festivals of the Dresden calendar, and that I was definitely going to have some trouble finding a hostel with a free bed. It’s almost as if it would have been a good idea to book a bed in advance. Haha, jk: when it comes to hostels, I don’t believe in the certainty of having a bed more than 12hr. in advance.

After arranging a full course meal of hostels that would force me to lug my pack across town three times in six days, I entered the Neustadt to put the “drank” back in “dancing on the freaking street.” Though the Neustadt has few Baroque facades to match its wealthier, more famous older brother on the south bank, it’s still a nostalgic labyrinth of vintage East German apartments, lazy balconies, and cobbled roads (which had to have been made to thwart the progress of bikers; seriously, as I rode my rented wheels, my brain felt like it was being blended into a strawberry daiquiri). What made this Straßenfest so amazing was watching these quintessentially old German streets fill with the new Germany, that is, the electro-addicted teens, the cops leaving no bag unsearched for weed, and, of course, the DJs, DJs, and more DJs. This Fest served as an invitation for every man, woman, and child in all of Saxony with a respectable turntable to dust off the LPs and spin like a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey in Purgatory. Most of them set their decks high up on a balcony, yielding some of the most ridiculous-looking dance parties since before John Travolta went crazy. Groups of high-school kids gettin’ down on cobblestones look so much more surreal when the source of their kickery is nowhere to be found.

I later came to find out the name of this classic of the Straßenfest form: “Bunte Republik Deutschland,” which is a pun on Germany’s formal title (the Bundesrepublik Deutschland), meaning “the Colorful” rather than “the Federal Republic of Germany.” Oh, those German puns: I’ll never get enough.