Nights 19 & 20: Dresden and surroundings - Part One

Weinböhla, Moritzburg, Dresden, and Meißen, to be exact. I really got around in my short time in the area and have a photo-hefty blog entry to prove it (*edit - that will have to come in parts).


The train ride from Leipzig to the little town of Weinböhla (just outside of Dresden) was just over an hour long. My next host picked met me at the train stopping point (it's actually called a stopping point as there is no station) and we walked back to his house. I was staying with another young family with two boys, ages 8 and 5, and a 1.5-yr-old girl. Their house was relatively new and brightly colored inside. It was also tremendously clean for three children. I was shown up to my beautiful newly-finished attic room, where I realized that it was a cute little house made for cute little people when I could hardly stand up straight without hitting my head on the ceiling. Kind of amusing.

We then went and picked up the 8-yr-old from school and went home for some German pancakes with applesauce and tea. The day was still young, so I asked for recommendations of things I could do that afternoon and my host ended up driving me to the little town of Moritzburg not far away. During tea and in the drive, my host told me stories about traveling through the USA and Canada for six months staying with Servas families, just like I was doing. It was wonderful to hear that many Americans and Canadians were just as open and generous as some of the people I'd met along my way. I felt like we bonded over this.

Moritzburg has a beautiful old castle in the middle of an artificial lake and not much else. However, it became a huge tourist attraction after a wildly popular Czech version of Cinderella was filmed here many years ago. My host drove me around the area, then let me explore on my own for a few hours. He'd loaned me a house key and had given me precise directions about how to get home, so I was all set.

As the castle was the only real attraction, I wandered there first. When I found it was closed and I still had a few hours to kill before the only bus came through to take me back, I had to get creative. It was very cold and snowing in wet, drizzly flakes, but I couldn't sit in a cafe for hours and hours, so I decided to walk around the pond and find the other smaller castle in the area that I'd seen in a flyer. It was pink. What could go wrong with a pink castle?


First of all, it was much farther away than I'd anticipated. Secondly, the road to get there was a squelching mess of mud and muck that was pretty much unavoidable. And thirdly, it was very cold and very wet. But... there was no where else to go.

Alas, the pretty picture I'd hoped for didn't exist and, of course, the weather made it impossible for me to keep my lense clean (as evidenced by the next picture). It didn't help that I'd forgotten my umbrella.

But! I did find this awesome pink lighthouse at the end! Hooray!

The next morning I took the tram into Dresden and spent the whole day looking around. I first went to the Erich Kästner Museum in Neustadt. He was a German author of books for all ages that I really like and did a project on for one of my classes last semester. The museum was actually a micro-museum in two rooms of a house where he'd lived. It consisted of little cabinets with drawers that you pull out that had different photos and documents inside. It was a neat idea and transportable, but my brain didn't want to spend hours pulling out drawers and reading little tiny German news clippings. I looked at all the photos and read what interested me, then moved on across the river to the Dresden Altstadt.


I was immediately struck by all the old, blackened gothic buildings. The city was heavily damaged during the war (and during several other wars before that), and I got the feeling that a lot of the city's identity revolves around its destruction.

Only during the last decade or so has the city begun to rebuild and modernize. There was a lot of construction going on everywhere, which was another interesting mix to see with all the blackened sandstone.

I wanted to see how the city looked from above, so I paid the two euro to climb the stairs in this church tower. Mostly I just saw construction, but there was also this angle where I could see the blackened steeples poking up above the rooftops.


I went inside many of the churches and was surprised at the variety of architecture I saw. The cathedral (big church just over the bridge) was very white and gold and baroque-y, but not very pleasing to my aesthetic senses. The second church had been recently remodeled and was only decorated with what looked like white-gray plaster and crude stone, very reminiscent of the war damage. I thought that was more meaningful and tasteful than the baroque gaudiness. The third church I went in was the Frauenkirche, which was rebuilt in the last few years by private funds after its total destruction in the war. I really liked it from the outside, as they had used some of the same bricks from the previous structure to rebuild it. You can still see traces of its past in the black bricks. Inside was a mass of pastel-colored baroque gaudiness like I'd never seen before and looked completely cheesy to me. (Dresden has a lot of pride in this church, so don't tell, okay?) It also didn't help that the pastor used the opportune moment when all the tour groups were inside to get on the mic and make us all sit while he read some Bible passages to us. I understand where he was coming from, but I don't think it was the most effective way to spread the word. Also, almost none of these churches allowed photography.


After more wandering, I decided to peek in one of the big art galleries in one of the city's palaces. I went inside, but decided not to pay the big entrance fee while it was so packed with loud tour groups.

I went back over the river to the folkart and puppetry museum across the river instead, but it was closed for the entire year while they redid things. That was unfortunate. Therefore, I went back over the river once more and sat in a cute and hip bio cafe for a couple hours sipping tea and reading the theater flyers until it was dark enough to take night photos from the bridge. I forgot to mention that it was very cold again, but at least not snow-raining so I stayed somewhat dry.

Once the photos were shot, I was more than happy to hop back on the tram and rejoin my hosts. That evening I had a nice long talk with them about growing up in East Germany. The husband was quite positive and had always apparently always been optimistic, while the wife had grown up in a household that had noticed more of the troubles. Neither of them had experienced any great difficulties like others and had always had what they needed, even if food and clothing and things were sometimes scarce. They also mentioned that they were never quite old enough to have the more dangerous parts of their situation affect them, as the reunification happened as they were reaching adulthood. The husband did tell me about visiting Hamburg on a choir trip just after the reunification and not being able to eat because he was so culture shocked by all the colors. Apparently everything he'd grown up with had been gray. That was very interesting. Either way, they were both pretty confident in their german-ness, but were clearly a little affected by the German Nazi stigma when traveling. One thing they said was that it was impossible to say they were "proud to be German" without one's mind automatically linking any degree of patriotism with Nazism. They also said they felt a little more East German than German as a whole, but not as much as I had anticipated they would. A good talk.

I still have a whole other cute medieval village with castle to talk about that I spent time in the next morning, but that'll have to wait as I only have a few more hours in Berlin and lots I want to see. Thus, I will post this and leave you with an image of Easter on the way in a house with three kids.