An Evening in Dresden

On Tuesday during our stay in Berlin, we decided to take a little overnight trip to Dresden.  It's a quick 2-hour train ride, and we wanted to see the sights and give Lauren and John a break from having two people sleeping in their living room.

Dresden is a beautiful little town whose entire face was changed after a pretty humongous and controversial WWII bombing in February of 1945.  It killed 25,000 civilians (including refugees from other places in Europe hoping to find safety) and destroyed a bunch of the gorgeous buildings from it's Saxon past.  

[Reasons for it's controversy: Americans and British justified the bombing cause it was a "military and industrial target" where rail transport and communication were important, but they actually didn't even bomb any of the rail transport systems or "communication centers".  It sounds like they just bombed them to be jerks and lower their moral.  Another one of those eye-opening American moments where you're like "Who us!?  Surely not."  And of course the Germans did stuff like this too in England and ruined lives but...I don't know.  It just wasn't the best picture of us.  And then they ended up being in the Iron Curtain for 40+ years, so that sucked too!  Poor Dresden.]

Moving on!

We love reading Rick Steves' books (even though he's not a nice person in real life, per Anna and Nell), and he always provides great walking tours of all of the cities he writes about.  So we took one.  I am now without the book so I don't know what half these buildings are, but I'm posting a few pics of them anyway.

Semperoper - the gorgeous opera house.

The Kreuzkirche, an Evangelical church, and the largest church in Saxony!

The inner courtyard of the Zwinger, a palace built by Augustus the Strong as an orangery, exhibition gallery, and festival arena for the Court.

The Zwinger glockenspiel, which also houses a porcelain museum.  The bell rings every hour with bells made of...what else?  Porcelain!

A Soviet building with Socialist Realist murals on the side.  Typical.

The Furstenzug, a large painted mural from 1870 which depicts the line of Saxon rulers throughout history. 

This is the Frauenkirche - a Lutheran church built in the 18th century, then destroyed in the bombing.  They left it's ruins as a war memorial, and then it was rebuilt when Germany reunited.  They completed the rebuilding and renovation in 2005.  Crazy!

And there's ol' Martin Luther out there, with this theses and opinions.

Part of the town square near the Frauenkirche, lined with tons of pretty restaurants and places to sit outside in the shadow of the church.  

The River Elbe, where we sat up top on a balcony and had an evening drink.

One of the pretty hilarious parts of the trip was our evening meal.  We carefully surveyed menus at all of the outdoor restaurants and finally decided on a generic but delicious-looking German place that served typical Saxon dishes.  I noticed something called Leberkase, which was hailed as being an "authentic German pork dish" with potatoes and sweet mustard.  Priding myself on my willingness to try just about anything and adapt the "When in Rome!" attitude, I asked the waitress a little more about this mystery dish.  In her broken English she said "It's...pork.  But don't ask me anything else about it cause I can't describe it.  But it's good."  I enthusiastically told her I'd have it - why not?  And it came with a fried egg on top!  Yum!

What came out was this.  The table over had their food delivered and the man had received something with a fried egg on top of what looked like a loaf of spam.  "Um...did you get something with a fried egg on top?" he cautiously asked.  I glanced over and knew that that's what I'd ordered.  Damnit.

And this is what came out.  Spam.  I just looked up the definition of Leberkase in German and it literally means "liver cheese".  Oh Lord.  It's actually pork, bacon, and onions all ground together and formed into a loaf and baked, resembling bologna, but...still.  Come on.  This isn't what I signed up for. I ate about half of it and politely told the waitress I just wasn't hungry anymore and devoured Drew's beef, potato, dumping and onion dish when he wasn't looking.  Ah well.  It's all about trying new things and new experiences, right?  Dangit.

We also made an appointment to visit the treasury the next day, the Grunes Gewolbe, which houses tons of amazing stuff from Augustus the Strong's time.  Really cool.

Dresden was a LOVELY city and we'd highly recommend it to anyone.  You don't need more than a night there but it's charming and beautiful, and has a very rich history.  But we were anxious to get back to our little angel bebe so...we did.  More on the final days in Berlin tomorrow!