"Hoyerswerda" Top 5 Page for this destination Dresden Off The Beaten Path Tip by Nemorino

This town, which is located 65 kilometers northeast of Dresden, has a really bad reputation in Germany. The architecture is GDR-vintage pre-fab apartment buildings of the kind known here as Plattenbau, unemployment is running at 28% and there have been some ugly Neo-Nazi incidents in recent years.

I didn't notice any of this when I was there. The town is clean, a lot of the buildings have been freshly painted, and the really awful slum buildings have mostly been torn down (people pointed out where they used to be). And there is a zoo, if you like that sort of thing.

The only somewhat disconcerting thing was that the town seems totally deserted after about six in the evening. We went to a nice restaurant called Lessing's (in a house where the writer of that name once lived, evidently), and we were the only people there on a Friday evening. All the other tables were empty. I suppose nobody can afford to go out for a meal.