Freiberg. Not Freiburg, Freiberg!

What a cozy town Freiberg. Right? Just look at how nicely all of the buildings are merged together, as one infinite construction. But there’s just one remark: I haven’t seen it. Not just it, but none of what this town can offer.

And here’s why it’s not the town that makes us love it but the people that live there and make this town prosper. And that’s my story of how I fell in love with the town not seeing a single building.

I have a travel-mate, and we often travel together. To be honest, we’re completely different, with different tastes and preferences but there’s one thing that unites us — a passion for everything adventurous. Here’s the key to why we’re washing hair in the sink of a mall, sleeping anywhere where it’s free — couchsurfing and if it’s impossible then in a car and many other odd and weird travellers’ things.

Freiberg is a small town near Dresden which we considered just as a sleeping place somewhere in the middle between Dresden and our next destination. So we found a host willing to give a shelter for 3 (!!!) Russian (!!!) boys (!!!) — combo. Hopefully we found such person.

So we arrived there at around 7 pm, found the right house and could not believe our eyes. It didn’t look ordinary. As it was dark outside, and leaving in the morning we forgot to take a picture of the building, I googled it and here’s what I found.

At first we thought we found the wrong house as it had happened to us earlier so many times! But having found the name of our host on the door we breathed a sigh of relief. As we were explained later it is a former hotel and now several students are renting the ground floor.

This was the very first time we appeared in a European student accomodation. I should explain that despite our location in Europe Russia can be called Europe rather distantly. And anything we see in the EU impresses us just like children. So the whole flat was designed with numerous posters, one of which was inviting people to the Communist Party! Right upon our heads there was a long LGBT flag made by themselves with the help of paper! It just looked creative.

We were invited there by a couchserfing member Christian, who showed us great hospitality. He treated us with different beers, we spent the whole evening and half of the night chatting with him and some of his friends. That was the night we didn’t feel any difference between our two nations. There’ve been talks about what it is to live in Russia, having two completely different capitals and living under sanctions and with resistance to Europe, also what it is to be born in a Soviet (East) part of Germany and having lived the whole life with the communist parents (which is true for both sides). It was a fascinating discussion.

We spoke a lot about us, Russians, them, Germans, and came to one conclusions: we are humans with different passports but with the same needs and truths. We all need friends and family, love and care. We all hate war and misunderstanding. As long as “the world is closing in” and we have common language, we should not find excuses to quarrel about. We’re civil people. The politics may change, but the human values must remain the same.

And this is a story of how nice and hospitable people made us want to come back and get to know the city.

P.S. There was one thing I simply could not forget about. As soon as headed myself to the loo, not paying a lot of attention, I was stopped and said: hey, you’re going to the loo, there you’ll see a “toilet record book” and they ask everyone coming to their house to leave a record about anything they want. As I don’t speak German, I have no idea what this book is about, but I can only guess as I can only understand the word “wurst”. That was something only students can invent. I’m thankful I met all of those people!