Fantastic week of vacation! I left needing a bit of alone time so badly.... and didn't find it. But it was a fantastic whirlwind. I carpooled to Dresden with my friend Eliz. We couchsurfed at a disgusting apartment, but we arrived at 1 am, 3 hours late (our driver got us there just in time to miss the last tram into the city, and we ended up on a parade of night buses to make each connection before the public transit shut down) so we didn't comment. Our super friendly host's apartment aside, Dresden is a beautiful city. It has that magical quality like Venice or Paris. The Altstadt was almost entirely bombed by the Allies at the end of the war, but it has been rebuilt exactly as before and is a great picture into history. We found a free walking tour and heard a lot of good stories! The king of Saxony wanted to be king of Poland so he covertly converted back to Catholicism. He built an entire catholic church in the center of town without telling anyone because the public (protestant) disapproval would be so great. He had to bring workers from Italy to Saxony to build it and housed them in a private village. Nearby that is the famous protestant church, funnily enough for a protestant church, named Frauenkirche, Church of Our Lady. This is a beautiful building and surrounded by a huge open area with great cafe patios (and a Canadian restaurant called Ontario!) and a few museums. On our last day there was a man playing a giant grand piano and a man making massive bubbles outside the church and hundreds of people were just spending the afternoon listening and watching in the sun. Magical! There's also the Zwinger nearby, which originally was a fortress, then converted to party grounds for a prince's wedding, and now houses a group of museums. 10 euro gets you into all three and the architecture and gardens alone is worth the visit. There's a math and physics museum that houses Newton's telescopes and the first burning/magnifying glasses as well as some of the first clocks and so on. There is also a beautiful porcelain museum (Saxony porcelain was originally fake porcelain and would sell as Chinese or Dutch porcelain, until people found out and Saxony was forced to label all of it's porcelain so that people would know it was second class. Now porcelain with that label is incredibly valuable). And there is an art gallery with Rafael's Sistine Madonna. The famous little cherubs at the bottom were apparently two kids that always sneaked in to watch him paint.
The Neustadt is actually the oldest part of town because it lasted through the bombing and is original. It's the artsy, university part of town and was nice to walk through. The Elbe river is pretty (although it lacks Windsor's riverfront - we really have done well with that) and runs behind three castles used by the Saxon royal family at one time. Now they are in a bit of disrepair but nice to walk behind. There is also a famous bridge there, famous because it was one of the first bridges not to use columns in the water. It literally looks like a miniature version of the Ambassador bridge, so I'm not sure what the big deal is, but it is greatly loved there, and was spared during the war because people protested it's destruction!
Our walk along the river to see this bridge introduced us to a friendly man who helped us with directions and asked where we were from. He was from Luxembourg but now lives between Dresden and Finland. He switched between German and English and I didn't even realize because he has an American/Canadian accent too! That is so incredibly rare here because everyone learns British English with a funny accent! I got incredibly excited because for the first time I could entirely understand a European speaking my own language! (The other day my Italian teacher started talking about fast food and I had no idea what she was saying. It turned out she was talking in English - I'm that bad with accents). Turns out he'd lost his accent while doing an internship in Rhode Island. Very cool to meet and chat with him and now Eliz and I have an open invitation to travel an hour north of Helsinki. Which is about an hour too inconvenient to ever be likely (haha).
The rest of our time was spent avoiding our couchsurfing couches and enjoying the GORGEOUS weather! Pictures to follow. My computer is currently sorting 18,000 photos for duplicates in the hope that that will help....
The Neustadt is actually the oldest part of town because it lasted through the bombing and is original. It's the artsy, university part of town and was nice to walk through. The Elbe river is pretty (although it lacks Windsor's riverfront - we really have done well with that) and runs behind three castles used by the Saxon royal family at one time. Now they are in a bit of disrepair but nice to walk behind. There is also a famous bridge there, famous because it was one of the first bridges not to use columns in the water. It literally looks like a miniature version of the Ambassador bridge, so I'm not sure what the big deal is, but it is greatly loved there, and was spared during the war because people protested it's destruction!
Our walk along the river to see this bridge introduced us to a friendly man who helped us with directions and asked where we were from. He was from Luxembourg but now lives between Dresden and Finland. He switched between German and English and I didn't even realize because he has an American/Canadian accent too! That is so incredibly rare here because everyone learns British English with a funny accent! I got incredibly excited because for the first time I could entirely understand a European speaking my own language! (The other day my Italian teacher started talking about fast food and I had no idea what she was saying. It turned out she was talking in English - I'm that bad with accents). Turns out he'd lost his accent while doing an internship in Rhode Island. Very cool to meet and chat with him and now Eliz and I have an open invitation to travel an hour north of Helsinki. Which is about an hour too inconvenient to ever be likely (haha).
The rest of our time was spent avoiding our couchsurfing couches and enjoying the GORGEOUS weather! Pictures to follow. My computer is currently sorting 18,000 photos for duplicates in the hope that that will help....