Day 13- Dresden!

Today was another cultural excursion, this time to Dresden! I got up early & then took a delightful 2.5 hour nap in the bus on the way there. It reminded me of early morning speech trips in high school...

We arrived in Dresden around 10am and went on a walking tour around the city. It’s relatively small, and I found it both depressing and hilarious that most of the old-looking buildings were actually restored or completely rebuilt only in the last 50 or so years. By the end of the tour, the default response to “so this building was first built in 17-something, and then...” was “it burnt down”, usually at least twice. However, it was absolutely beautiful, albeit way too hot, and fun was had wandering around the cute cobblestoned alleys. 

This building was actually built for one of the Duke of Saxony’s mistresses, who cleverly made him sign a contract when she agreed to be his mistress that she would receive money, her own palace, and his hand in marriage. She ended up in jail in her later years, but she lived the high life for quite some time due to her own ingenuity. #girlpowergoals Anyways, now it’s the most fancy hotel in all of Dresden. 

 This was the square outside of the palaces, and the little green person is where we later climbed 215 steps up inside a tower that provided us some spectacular views. 

This was one of my favorite buildings in Dresden. It was an old church that was built in 1727. It’s called the Frauenkirche, and it’s dome used to be one of the most distinctive features of the Dresden skyline. It was destroyed during WW2, and the citizens of Dresden liked it so much they actually painstakingly numbered and organized the rubble to put it back together. This is what gives it such a mottled color, where old sandstone blocks were put back in their original place right next to new ones during the reconstruction from 1993-2005.  

Next we went to the old royal palace, most of which had been turned into a museum. It was one of the most extravagant museum displays I’ve ever seen, there was room after room of trinkets made from every precious material you can think of. It was a nice way to spend an afternoon, and I learned lots about the Duke of Saxony (who was also the King of Poland) and his confusing history and family. 

The last thing we did before leaving the city was to climb up a tower in the old palace for a gorgeous view.