We awoke in Dresden, and had a lazy morning before finally getting going. As I mentioned in my post last year, was the fire bombed towards the end of WWII. The bombing, according to some estimates, killed 100,000 people. In an image search I saw countless awful photos, this one is thankfully devoid of bodies. It hopefully gives an idea of the scope of the devastation.
At any rate, the city has done an amazing job of recovering and renovating, and to this day a lot of work is still ongoing to restore the old buildings as well as make up for the neglect of the communist regime.
Our first stop was to the Frauenkirche, which like the city was completely destroyed, collapsing several days after the bombing. The Eastern German government decided to leave it as a monument of the war, but following the fall of the Berlin wall a movement formed to rebuild it. Thanks in large part to the contributions of American and British philanthropists the church re-opened its doors in 2005.
From here we headed towards the Semper Opera house, where Giselle works. The Opera house saw numerous premiers from famous composers such as Wagner, and is highly regarded for its architecture.
Here's some random building ... I think it is part of the Residenzschloss.
We then went up a tower in a small castle called Residenzschloss (which was home to Saxon kings until 1918 ... I think our high school rival's mascot is the Saxons. That's not supposed to be funny or clever or anything, I'm just shocked I remembered anything school spirit-y from high school) to get views of the city.
Finally the tours ended at the Baroque Zwinger palace (can you tell I’m losing steam and reverting to basically being a boring guide book now?) …
After our tour of the town (on a glorious day) we headed back to recharge and dress sharp. Giselle was performing in her final premier, 4 Farben Rot. It was 4 separate short pieces. The first two were more classical in nature, while the last two were much more modern. Giselle had several roles within the final piece. The last two in particular were very cool. Kathleen would be happy to know that in the 4 piece there was actually some speaking (unlike your Nutcracker experience back whenever). Unfortunately our lousy cameras couldn’t get any gems from the evening, but here’s Giselle bowing to her admiring public.
After the show we attended a party,
And then called it a night.05/04:
The next day we went out for breakfast with Giselle and her friends Andrea, Erin and Jano. After a tasty American style breakfast we hopped on a bus bound for the Berlin airport. There we met up with two of my friends from Lund, Raphael (whom Courtney has met) and my old roommate Ralf (whom she hadn’t). We had a few beers and hung out, which was great since it had been a while since I had seen either of the guys, particularly Ralf.
And with that we flew home and arrived back in Stockholm ready to take on another week of work! Huzzah!
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