Time flies by...

It's hard to believe that we are 2/3 of the way through the program.  The students have adapted better than any group I have travelled with.  They are moving confidently forward as their ability to live in a different culture increases.  Most importantly, all have made progress in their ability in understanding and speaking in German. 

The group went on an excursion to Dresden yesterday, and discovered that Dresden was in the middle of a week-long festival.  There were hundreds of different booths selling everything from medieval foods (the city is 800+ years old) to hand made goods and souveniers along with five different stages with entertainment spread out across the older part of the city.  They were so far apart, you couldn't even hear one when at another. 

We had a bus tour when we arrived, seeing the Erich Kästner memorial, the Hygiene Museum (the "Ball Thrower" statue from the front),which was sponsored the the inventor of a German mouth wash.  We also saw  the transparent VW manufacturing plant immediately next to the downtown in the newer part

of the city, and some of the housing from the 1800s that survivied the Feb. 1945 fire bombing. Some students took the opportunity to walk to the top of the church to get a look at the whole city from above.

The tiles (one portion is on the right) that tell the history of the city's royal families are made of Meissen porcellan, and survivied the 1000 degree heat of the fire bombing. Since it was so hot, we took frequent breaks to stop for something to drink and sit in the shade. Even though Dresden is in a river valley (the Elbe), and that makes for more humid weather than we were used to in the mountains of Ilmenau, it was still much lower than Cincinnati, because as soon as we got in the shade, we felt ok.

We then had a guided walking tour through the old part of the city, seeing the Frauenkirche (Our Lady's Church), rebuilt between 1994-2005, and wonderfully restored to its Baroque style. The church was begun in the 12th century, with changes as the years passed.  It survived the fire bombing, then collapsed two days later.  With neither the money nor desire to rebuild it immediately after WWII, it lay as rubble as a warning in the 1980s.  After the wall fell in 1989, there was a world-wide appeal for money, then a search for master stone masons, who used what stones were left and built the rest from scratch according to the original plans.  The darker sections are not from the fire, although they are the original stones.  The darkness is the normal aging process of sandstone, the material of this building. 

Below is a photo of the "Lemon Press" building, the Kunstakademie (Art Academy).  There was a great controversy about the cuppola's style.