SORAT Hotel Gorlitz - Gorlitz, Germany     

We spent one night in Gorlitz at the Hotel Sorat. It's a bit of a hike from the train station, but at least you have the opportunity to see a typical East German high street on the way. The Sorat is in a rehabbed older building and is clean and comfortable, though nothing special. Most of their clientele is German (and mainly male business travelers). Not surprisingly, the buffet breakfast features a lot of meat and cheese and little in the way of fruits or veggies. The staff is very friendly and tries to be helpful, though lack of English is a bit of a bar. The Sorat is on a plaza abutting the main historic sections of the city, so it's an easy walk to anything you want to see. For the most part, we wandered the streets of the town center--fortunately for Gorlitz the end of Silesia transformed their proud city into a backwater. So, it wasn't worth bombing in either World War and wasn't turned into a socialist worker's paradise of anonymous concrete apartments under the GDR. Since 1989, lots of young entrepreneurs have started rehabbing the architectually fabulous buildings into cafes, shops, bars, and probably soon boutique hotels. See it before the tour busses arrive and we all love it to death! (Sadly, I heard that Rick Steves is adding it to his Germany book. Start the countdown to tourists overrunning the place...) By the way, you can walk across a small bridge into Poland where the other half of the city ended up after boundaries were redrawn after the war. Same great architecture, bu largely unrehabbed unless you count gutting the bottom floor for a cigarette shop or a money changing business.

Man kann dort gut wohnen, die Lage ist sehr gut, das Personal sehr nett. Kein Restaurant, nur Frühstück. Mein Zimmer war sehr klein, aber alles Nötige war da.