It’s your birthday! Yes Justine turns (mumble mumble) today. And there is no better city in the world than Prague to wake up to on your birthday, or so she tells me. And then to finish the day in Germany a dream she has had for many years, is a dream come true.
We made our way to Leipzig via Dresden. My memory of Dresden is seeing it absolutely flatten in 1945, so initially we were surprised to see as many spires and steeples as we did coming into town. As it turns out most of these places have been rebuilt stone by stone in the years since, well actually, just in the last twenty years.
We went into the Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady), this has been rebuilt from the ground up. You can tell the original stone work by the dark stones on the outside, and there aren’t many of them. From the outside this church looks amazing, the inside also looks fantastic, albeit very clean and new looking, almost sterile. But the real surprise was the circus that was going on in there. It is obviously a tourist attraction, with people pushing, shoving, calling to each other, scrambling over the top of each other to get the closest to whatever, taking photos, and all this whilst a service is going on. We couldn’t wait to get out of there. It was the most appalling behaviour that we have seen in a church yet.
After our ‘religious experience’ we decided to give the rest of the churches here a big swerve, despite the fact that we have read that one of them contains the heart of ‘Augustus the Strong’. He’s wasn’t a saint (that we are aware of) and yet he still got his body parts strewn around.
We decided to head to the museums in the Zwinger fortress. We went into the Galerie Alte Meister and followed this with the Rustkammer. The Galerie Alte Meister houses some fantastic works including rooms dedicated to Remembrant, Rubens and Raphael. There were also some works there by artists that we haven’t heard of before that brought out the ‘Wow!’ The strange thing about this gallery was that while we were there, they seemed to have some sort of aside exhibition going on. In a room full of the works of Great Masters they would have a glass case in the corner with an American Indian battle headdress, or a North African something else, etc. These items were rather cool, but they just seemed so out of place, it was kind of weird.
The Rustkammer is an armoury museum, particularly featuring ceremonial armour. This stuff was cool and definitely the stuff of ‘boys own annual’ and dreams of knights and chivalry. As well as full body armour from different ages, various levels of ornamentation, gold, gem incrustation, it had weapons of all different shapes and sizes. Some of these you wouldn’t imagine even in your wildest dreams. Combination flintlock pistols with hatchet head handles, spring loaded knife blades, rifles with barrels three meters long, … This was the material of fantasy movies and playstation games.
Dresden seems a very cool place with so much history and culture, a place that is probably worth exploring properly, but by the time we left it was starting to rain, time to get out of there. Between Dresden and Leipzig we had torrential rain, thunder, lightening and huge hailstones. The weather was bad enough to bring the traffic on the autobahn to a complete standstill. Fortunately this didn’t last very long and by the time we got to Leipzig we had sunshine again.
Our first impression when we arrived at our hotel was, why do we get the best places to stay when we are only there for one night? This place had everything, a proper kitchen, bathroom, and even a lounge (we didn’t need to perch on the end of our bed to sit down). For us, this was pure luxury. We finished the day with a home cooked meal … bliss.
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