Dresden

On Thursday I decided to go to Dresden with several other students that were planning on going. We bought our train tickets and left Friday at 10:30am. The train was packed and we didn't have reservations so we had to just walk around until we found open seats. The ride was only two hours so we arrived around 12:45 and started to walk to our hostel and found some food. We came upon the UFA Palace, which is a movie theater designed by Coop Himmeblau. I think it looks like a giant glass rock that fell from the sky. The inside was filled with concrete columns and crazy metal staircases. We also came upon a fountain made of broken up chunks of glass. After walking around the city a little bit we headed to the VW factory where we were told that they were closed but we were to come back the next day for an English tour at 3pm. We also found a small market that was going on in a parking lot that reminded us a lot of the state fair. There were several booths set up selling jewelry, t-shirts, candy, etc. and also a lot of food vendors that sold all typical German food like bratwurst and schnitzel. They also had beer and really good pastries and crepes. We ended up eating here for lunch the next two days.

It started to get dark and we walked through the more historical part of Dresden where we saw a lot of the old churches lit up that were destroyed in the bombing in World War II, like most of the city, and then later rebuilt. The city looked really pretty lit up over the water as we looked at it from one of the bridges. We decided to eat dinner at a German restaurant where most of us got one liter beers. John's meal was even served on a sword in place of a skewer. I had barbeque chicken, which was actually just ketchup with curry, and potato wedges. That night we went to bed a little bit early so we could get up early the next day to explore.

The next day we woke up and walked back down to the water and to the area with the churches and the opera house. We walked into one of the churches which was the most recent Baroque church to be completed in Dresden and there was a Catholic mass going on inside. I actually recognized the part of mass that they were on even though it was in German because the priest was singing the same song. We also walked through the gardens inside the large courtyard of the Zwinger, which is a large complex with a lot of pavilions and galleries. After eating lunch at the market again we headed towards the VW Factory for our tour. Our guide took us through the factory which is actually extremely clean and without the car bodies on the conveyor belts, it would not really look like a factory at all. This factory is the only place in the world where VW makes the Phaeton which I guess could be considered their luxury car. The cheapest one sells for 65,000 Euro, which is about $100,000. Customers come to the factory to custom design their Phaetons and then the car is made here. The customer can then either pick it up at the factory or have it delivered to them. The large glass cylinder in the front of the building is the parking garage where the Phaetons are stored until they are picked up.

After the tour, we walked around some more and then headed back to the hostel to get ready before dinner. We were referred to a neighborhood German restaurant that was a 15 minute walk from the hostel. When we walked in it seemed that everyone stared at us and it was kind of uncomfortable but then our waiter was very nice. The whole menu was in German and almost everything had pork in it so it was hard to pick something to eat. I ended up getting a Greek salad that was very good. The beer here was also extremely cheap compared to being in Paris or Barcelona. We stayed for a while hanging out and drinking and our waiter even gave us a free desert.

The next morning we woke up and checked out of the hostel and then headed downtown again before we had to get on our 1:10 train. We stopped by the market for the last time to have some crepes and bratwurst and walked through the city a little bit more before heading back to Prague. This time the train was not so packed and we could all sit together. The train ran along a river and we had really good views of several small towns with castles and some cool little bridges. It was actually nice to hear the voice on the train speak Czech again when we knew we were almost back to Prague.