Dresden

Okay. So shame on me. I have not blogged in over one month and I am now paying for it. Here I am, it is 1 am where I am, and I can't sleep because the anxiety from all these backlogged blogs is keeping me awake. So I decided to start chipping away at the huge pile of blogs I have waiting for me. My trip to Dresden happened way back on the 16th of December so it really has been a while. So yeah, I decided to go to Dresden in December with some of the other participants in CBYX. We really wanted to go in December so we could catch one of the many wonderful Dresden Christmas markets. Dresden is known for having really great Christmas markets. Let me tell you...Dresden did not disappoint. Dresden had many Christmas markets but the main one was really great. It was large with a pretty old ferris wheel. Plenty of food and plenty of little knick knacks.

I am gonna go off on a tangent now to tell you a little about the German Christmas markets. They all basically have the same knick knacks. They all have a wood work stand filled with wooden ornaments and other things made out of wood (although it was kicked up a notch in Dresden because Sachsen, where Dresden is,  is where all those beautiful wood ornaments are made). They all have a blown glass ornament stand and they all have a candle holder stand. Now, just because they have mostly the same things does not degrade them in any way it just means that you don't need to feel like you are missing out on any great Christmas gifts if you don't live in a certain area. Just buy them where it is most convenient. The food and drink can vary from region to region though. I was very lucky that my Christmas market in Magdeburg had fried mushrooms. Not everyone is that lucky. Almost every single Christmas market in Germany also has a Weihnachstpyramide. You can see two of them in the above picture. They are basically a wooden pyramid with people dancing around them and there is a fan on top. Now they don't really spin without a motor with those huge ones you see but the smaller models (that you can find at every Christmas market) really spin without electricity. The smaller Weihnachstpyramiden have places to put tea-lights. The warm air produced by the tea lights rises and pushes the wooden fans around causing the Weihnachtspyramide to actually move. Gotta love those German engineers! Every Christmas market also has Glühwein! It is very sweet wine served warm. It is a German tradition and the stuff can be found everywhere in Germany during the holidays. I would also like to say that the Dresden Christmas market did have one pretty awesome nativity scene. It had real sheep in it. It was like a petting zoo!

Real sheep!

Dresden also had this really cool medieval Christmas market. It was in the courtyard of a building and everything was medieval themed. It even had a hot tub that you could sit in for a certain price. It was so strange to be walking through this market, in the cold, in a winter jacket only to have someone run past you in a swimsuit to get to the bathroom. Haha I really felt sorry for that poor soul...I hope he was able to make it back to the hot tub in quickly.

Dresden is also in former east Germany and was also destroyed in WWII much like Magdeburg. Dresen, however, did a really good job of restoring the destroyed structures and trying to give people a sense of what the city used to look like. The two main rebuilt structures I saw were the Frauenkirche and the Kreuzkirche. On both of them you can see very dark bricks with some very light ones. The light bricks are the new ones and the dark bricks are the old salvaged bricks from the original that the city used to build the new ones. They rebuilt them as close to the original as possible. The Frauenkirche is fairly new. I believe it was completed in 2005. One of the participants that lived in Dresden even told us that the Frauenkirche is so newly built that Google Earth still shows it as a construction site. Crazy!

Kreuzkirche, Dresden

Frauenkirche, Dresden with a little Christmas market around it. See the different colored bricks?

The inside of the Frauenkirche. It was very white and gold and very pretty.

The participant that we were visiting in Dresden was nice enough to look into a candle light organ concert that the Frauenkirche was having that weekend. We attended and it was very nice. I am not gonna lie, if you are human with blood coursing through your veins, you will get bored at least a little bit during an organ concert. It is only natural. There you are, sitting for almost and hour just listening to the organ music. I am just saying that to be honest but it was nonetheless very nice. Candles everywhere and organ music playing.

Beautiful right?

CBYX gang's all here.

Below I have included two special pictures from the weekend I spent in Dresden. One is of a santa statue we saw. Here I thought I was going to Germany where Santa was going to be very traditional and tame but instead I find a statue of him that makes him look like he is performing in the World Wrestling Federation. I mean sheesh! The other is a photo of me holding a cookie I designed to look like the state of Wisconsin. The Dresden CBYXers had already made friends with people who were not in the program...they were just in Germany on their own accord. We were invited to their house for a bit and one of them brought out this big ol' ball of dough and invited us to make cookies of whatever shape we wanted. I was at a loss so I just decided to make a cookie shaped like Wisconsin. It got a little warped in the oven but you can still totally see the peninsula.

Can you smell what the elves are cookin'?! Ahhh Santa is about to drop that present on his opponent!

Don't deny it, you see the peninsula. That is Wisconsin baby! It tasted very yummy!

A special thanks to Andrea for letting all 3 of us sleep on the floor of her dorm room...I had back problems for about a week after but, hey, a floor is free and a hostel is not. My body can heal itself my wallet cannot. I also found the perfect Christmas gifts in Dresden for my family back home so, for that, I was really thankful.

Oh! By the way! There was this really cool bar in Dresden that had all kinds of board games. Beer and board games made for a very awesome night with some of the coolest people I have ever met. I think back on that night very fondly with many a laugh.