Innenstadt
At the Terraces' other end, one should walk a few steps up Carola Bridge and turn around. Here, Dresden's divergence is most impressive: to the right, there is the city's picturesque silhouette that could not possibly have been painted more romantically; to the left, however, nothing but futuristic high-rises up until the very horizon. Following the St. Petersburger Straße, the road that Carola Bridge runs into, you'll be led into the city center. That said, Dresden has no real center in the sense of a huge shopping district, but at least there is the Prager Straße, a modern pedestrian zone featuring several controversial architectural feats, such as the three almost identical Ibis Hotel towers and the two postmodern wells. The Prager Straße is a passable shopping street with all popular Western department stores like Karstadt, international chains such as H&M or Foot Locker, fast food restaurants, and a futuristic cinema called UFA Palace, incidentally Dresden's only movie theater showing the latest movies (in English too, if only from Sunday to Tuesday). To the street's southern end, you'll find the central station at the Wiener Platz, one of Dresden's many construction sites, showing that the city is still reconstructing and advancing.