Correction, I consider this, rather unfortunately though, the only highlight of that particular trip.
Perhaps, it is good to know that Dresden is extremely close to Saxon of Switzerland, the latter an ideal place for hiking in the mountains with beautiful scenery, throw in the large boulders, bizarre stone formations (the mountain range was created after the sea retreated and left sandstone as the remains) , cliffs and the famous Bastei Bridge to boot. Dresden is also the capital of German Federal Free State of Saxony. For the longest time, royal Kings like King Augustus resided and ruled there. So you get a clearer picture. Dresden, Saxons.
So anyway, t'was my brilliant plan to take a day off in Dresden and plant ourselves into the wild Saxon Switzerland which is about 30 km upward the Elbe river from Dresden. In layman's terms, it is about half an hour by train from where I stayed in Dresden. This is a mountain area made of sandstone is and absolutely gorgeous even though it is possibly an adventurous, no i mean crazy idea, to head up there in winter, especially
when we the sun begins to set by 3:30 pm. We took the interurban U-Bahn train to Pirna !
only to get stopped by 2 undercover policemen (we conveniently mistook them for thugs or underground drug dealers) at the tourist information centre! One of them approached me upfront (never confront a woman frontally, it's so intimidating I tell you) and demanded to see our passports and documents etc, which of course we hesitated a little because there really are so many scam police stories around, enough to make us apprehensive. Anyway, to cut a long story short, there was quite a big hoo-ha going on and to add fuel to fire, they were speaking in German whilst we were speaking in English. It's like as the Chinese idiom goes, playing piano melodies to a cow.
C'mon, just because we look like foreigners doesn't mean we are illegal immigrants- that seems to be their fear. ppfft. How insulting. So here is a picture of us in the police car. The bo liao things border policemen do.
I was so upset, not so much because I was in the police car (although the whole event seemed a tad 'kafkaesque') but more so because i DID NOT GET TO SEE SAXON SWITZERLAND!!Not to mention it is one of the places I was in charge of researching for.
:: Border policemen (not the undercover ones) ::Anyway, all's well. The misunderstanding was cleared and the funny thing was that they actually apologised, shook our hands and said we could take a picture. Rather polite I must say. Interestingly enough, Saxon Switzerland has a castle built to jail high-ranking prisoners, this explains the paranoia of the border police. Haha!
So much for all the hype about sandstone, mountains and cliffs :(
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