Our Blog - Dresden, Germany

As many of you know, we like to visit a Christmas Market every year, and this year we chose Dresden. The Dresden Striezelmarkt is regularly voted the favorite Christmas market in German-speaking countries and this year was the 590th edition, making it the oldest Christmas market in Germany. The city is famous for the baroque architecture that dominates its old town. From a small Slavic settlement, it became the seat of some of the Holy Roman Empire’s prince-electors and then the home of the Dukes of Saxony and, in the early 1700s, the Kings of Poland and Grand Dukes of Lithuania. And of course, the buildings had to be built or remodeled to befit Kings and Grand Dukes.

This was our first time in a city in the former "East Germany" (officially the German Democratic Republic or GDR) other than Berlin (which was divided). It is a fairly good-sized city with 1/2 a million people, and the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) is one of the 10 largest universities in Germany. It also is home to quite a number of high-tech companies (or branches of them) so it is often called "Silicon Saxony". During the reign of King Augustus II "the Strong" and his son, King Augustus III of Poland, may of the city's baroque landmarks were built. Unfortunately, the city was bombed beyond recognition near the end of World War II (I'll talk more about this in Day 1). However, unlike many of its Western German counterparts, the city center of Dresden was painstakingly restored using old techniques and design elements.

As we were coming into Dresden, it was pretty green, so no snow for our Christmas market this year.

We were there for 3 nights, and we were able to get in early enough to see a few things. You'll get to see a few things and I'll cover the bombing of Dresden in my Dresden Day 1 blog page.

In my Dresden Day 2 blog, you'll see the majority of the main buildings in the the historical center from the outside and a couple churches.

Then our last full day, my Dresden Day 3 blog will cover the museums that we visited in the Palace and the famous Opera house.

This was another vacation without Lucy, and she stayed at the same place as she did during our Greece vacation. She got to spend time with a different set of puppy friends.

Heading home, I thought this picture was really kinda cool ... the shadow of the plane in the middle of a round "rainbow".