Discovering Dresden

After a night in Frankfurt, I took a train to the east of Germany to Dresden to visit a friend who is living there for a few months to study. The friend was one I met on a tour in France a few years ago and I was excited about having a mini reunion in her new home town and seeing the sights.

And Dresden doesn't disappoint. The capital of Saxony has a really different vibe to the central and western areas of the country and I liked its laid back vibe.

Despite having a terrible cold and being quite unwell, my lovely friend met me at the train and took me for a walking tour around the city before we headed back to her flat.

We started in the city center and did a walk around the historical Altstadt (Old Town) and then made our way to the city centre of Dresden-Neustadt. We walked up to the top of the Zwinger Palace (more about that later) to see the gardens and then walked past the Catholic Church and the Sempervivum Opera before heading back to her flat to make pasta and catch-up on all the news.

The next day my friend's illness really caught up with her so I set out on my own to explore the town while she found a doctor and some good medication.

I wandered around the city for a bit, enjoying the sunshine and cool breezes and all the different little touches that make new places so interesting.

The traffic walk/stop signs in Dresden are kind of special and interesting and have a cool story behind them. Rather than the little stick figures we usually see, these Ampelmännchen or "little traffic light men" were designed in the early 1960's with the aim of differentiating between the stop and go with shape and colour so that even people with colour blindness could see them. After the reunification of East and West Germany, there was a push to get rid of them because they are a purely East German feature, but the public pushed back and today they are there is a whole Ampelmännchen memorabilia industry and you can buy "walking man (or women) bags and t-shirts and postcards. Not particularly high-brow culture, but I found it interesting.

One of the things I always associated with Dresden was the city's porcelain and I was interested to see more of it. Porcelain isn't actually made in Dresden, but has been manufactured out of Meissen since 1705 and is still made there today. I didn't have time to visit the town but I dropped into the Meissen shop in one of the bigger hotels to look at the famous work and gape at the prices.

I fuelled up with a veal schnitzel with mushroom sauce and a beer in a courtyard cafe and then wandered down to the Elbe River to look at the view and then walked up to the Zwinger, which is a fabulous Baroque building. The gardens in the Zwinger courtyard are just beautiful and the buildings around them hold different museums you can visit.  I started with the porcelain museum which holds some of the extensive collection of August the Strong (yes, he was really known for that). August really had a thing for porcelain and not only collected it from all over the world, he also captured and enslaved the guy who eventually began Meissen porcelain; thus creating the local industry and creating pieces he thought could rival the Chinese techniques. [Item, while enslaving a man and making him make porcelain isn't very nice, the guy was claiming that he was an alchemist and could create gold, so there was a little justification for the action!]

The other side of the building had an extensive gallery and I wandered around the paintings until it was time to meet my friend for kaffee and kuchen (coffee and cake) to refuel and catch-up on our days. 

Then we wandered into the Frauenkirche (the Church of Our Lady) which has been reconstructed after being completely destroyed by allied bombing during the Second World War (it wasn't finished until 2005). It's a very pastel-pretty church upstairs, but the elements of the original church in the basement are lovely and well worth a visit.

While a scant two days aren't enough to really see everything, having a local guide made all the difference and I'm so glad I got to explore this interesting area of Germany.