Today I (Dave) finished the Passiv Haus conference at the outstanding Congress Convention Center, here, right on the Elbe River.    I’ll write more about that over at GreenEarthEquities.   But here I’ll note some difference between this convention center and the typical ones in the US.

1.  As a 3 story venue, there was only one elevator, mainly used by handicapped.   Everyone else tramped up and down the stairs, many times as the sessions changed.   No wonder there are almost no overweight Europeans.

2.  Standing around tables is the way they eat here.

3.  There was more thought put into design than in most US convention centers which are just big.

Once again, we were impressed with buildings that are centuries old rather than decades.

Luelle said …  the downtown shopping area of Dresden was very interesting.  As it was Saturday, there were a lot of people and families

enjoying their day off.  There were several  big (5 story) department stores in the area, and a large mall.

Most of the mall was similar to what we would find in any US city, a lot of clothing, shoes, sporting good stores, etc.  But the thing I always like about European Malls is that they have grocery stores in them.  There were two in this Dresden Galleria, and I checked them both out.  I like to see the different ways they package and sell food in other countries.  The food prices seemed very reasonable, I’d say less expensive than at home.  But I may not have taken into account the difference between the dollar and the Euro.

Most of the clothing, shoes, other necessities seemed more expensive.  I had thought with the Euro going down in value against the dollar that things would have appeared less expensive.  Two years ago we were in Scandanavia, when the dollar was low, and everything was very expensive.  The restaurant food here was been reasonable, and very tasty.  Although I have only been to Germany once before, I anticipated rather bland food — but that was not the case.

We are looking forward to the other countries we will be visiting — Austria, Hungary and Switzerland to see how they compare.

Tomorrow will be an adventure getting to our ship.   I am going by plane to Munich and then catch the transfer provided by Uniworld.   That shouldn’t be a problem.   Dave is doing a final field trip with his Passiv Haus conference.   He’ll need to leave a little early and cab to retrieve his bags and then get to the train station.   He’ll (hopefully) make three transfers and get to our ship about midnight.    I dont know why he likes those trains so much, but he does…..

We arrived in Dresden about 50 minutes late.   A dour chap from London told us to expect that the train would be late … they’re always late.    He was a glass half empty fellow.

The train runs along the Elbe River all the way from Prague to Dresden. It was swollen but not quite flooding. It did totally flood the Dresden train station about 10 years ago ... shutting everything down of course.

The train ride was great.  Very smooth and quiet.   These are electric trains like Noah’s train set, unlike the diesel engines in the US.  (AmTrak)

We got to our hotel which is only 500 meters from the Congress Center, where the Passiv Haus conference starts tomorrow.

Entrance to the Zwinger Museum and Theater. Compare to the Wikipedia Photos

We walked in to town and were surprised at a couple of things:

1.  All the old buildings that were not destroyed.   We had heard of the firebombing of Dresden as the final straw to break Nazi resistance in WWII, kind of like the German Hiroshima.   But there were tons of 100-500 year old buildings.   Later we found that a lot of restoration was done to rebuild the “old” buildings to look as they had for hundreds of years.

Fountain at a nicer hotel than we are staying at. You'll have to ask Luelle. She collected a brochure for you.

2. The growth and new construction is going like gangbusters.  No recession evident here.   We have never seen so many construction cranes building big projects since we were in Beijing, right before the Olympics.

No Recession Here!

The "Max" was our best restaurant so far ... but we're still looking.

Then we found the best restaurant of our trip so far. At least Dave thought so, because we had an upper floor window seat looking out at 5 construction cranes working away, lifting things into place until 9 o’clock at night.  Romantic?  Well…..

Check out this Wikipedia Link to the Zwinger Museum.  Note the photos on the right,  before and after.   An interesting factoid is that if the  officer portrayed in the recent Tom Cruise movie Valkerie had been an engineer instead of a politician, the Dresden bombing would never have happened because the assassination attempt on Hitler by his conscientious officers would have succeeded … rent the movie.

Scaffolding and workmen restoring old buildings is a common sight everywhere we’ve been in Europe.    In America all our buildings are young, under 200 years, mostly under 100 and a lot under 50 years of age.

Close Up of the photo at left. What do you think the guy on the top scaffold is thinking? He seems a little outside the OSHA requirements

These would all be considered youngsters in Europe, where 300 to 1000 year is the more usual age.

This restoration project, seen in the Jewish Quarter from our room in the Intercontinental Hotel in Prague (Praha) is between 300 & 400 years old.   The workers seem well secured with scaffolding and OSHA like safety equipment.

Entrepeneurs and Marketers have seized the opportunity and almost all of the large scaffolding works have these advertising multi-purpose protective drapes. Here BMW is taking advantage of the view

Maintaining the history is a serious challenge in all of Europe.   Many buildings from Cathedrals to Museums and others all charge admission to help defray the cost of maintenance.   Large projects like bridges and monuments are handled by the government,  part of the reason for the higher taxes in older Europe compared to the youngster, America.

Prague is too big and has too much to offer to do it justice in 3 days.  Last time Luelle mentioned that the first thing we do in a new place is figure out the money.   How many of these for how many of those.  It is complicated a little bit by needing to have 3 currencies, Czech Crowns,  Euros, & US Dollars.   Haven’t used any Euros and Dollars only for tips.

The Czech Republic seems very proud of their culture and history and wants to use their own money, even after joining EU a few years ago. The next thing we do is figure out the transportation. In the big cities that means the “Metro” or “Tube” or “Underground” … Different cities have different names for it, but it’s basically the Subway.   The Prague Metro is very good and easy enough to understand for a first timer.    We also found a fair amount of English being understood, especially if they are selling something.   But for common speaking it is 100% Czech.

One “must see” in Prague is a walk across the Charles Bridge. It has about two dozen statues along each side of the bridge.   Mostly saints and warriors and Jesus and Mary.    We’re finding that there has been a lot of killing and intrigue in Bohemia over the centuries,  and a lot of it was over which way you believed in Jesus and Mary!

The river has a weir across it,  I think to keep the water level up.   There is a small channel going around the dam that the small boats use to go up and downstream.   see photo.

So far our favorite things to eat have been the ghoulasch and some gnochi that we had while exploring today.

We like tours to get a good flavor of a new area but we didn’t get around to it this time.   No doubt we missed some things by striking out on our own, but we also encountered some things that we would have missed if we had been on a tour.   Either way you choose to go, Prague can keep you busy for a week.

This Bohemian Knight was guarding the bridge. So we felt very safe!

We couldn't stay for the concert, but thought the blue jeans were and interesting touch of "Westernization" and relaxing of European propriety.

Until I started selling River Cruises, I had no notion of wanting to visit Prague.  Would have been hard pressed to tell you exactly where it was. But more and more people have been wanting to add it on to their River Cruise, that my interest grew.  As we planned our current trip, which is also including a Passiv Haus Energy Conference for my husband in Dresden Germany, I found that Prague and Dresden were quite close to each other.  So Prague became our first stop on this journey.

What struck me first is how clean it is — especially the older buildings.  I am sure it is rennovations that they have had to make, but it is beautiful. Building after Building, hundreds of years old without the years of grime or grafitti on them.

The first thing when we come to a new country is to try to figure out how their money works.

When we got to the airport, I got $200 US Dollars worth of CZ and $200 US Dollars worth of money to use in Hungary.  For CZ I was able to get 1930 CZ per $100 so it is 20 for $1.

I have to keep converting it in my mind.  The taxi ride from the airport was posted as 492 CZ, and when I gave the taxi driver 1000 CZ I only got back 400.  So somehow it went from 492 to 600, but he spoke no English so I couldn’t ask him.  600 = $30.  Not bad for a taxi drive that took at least 30 minutes.

We are actually staying in the Jewish Quarter, not far from the River.  We just returned from dinner at midnight, and the streets are well-lighted and feel very safe.

There are so many twists and turns though, we did get lost coming back to the hotel.  We were able to find where we had been last night in Wenceslas Square and were able to retrace our steps from there.

For lunch today we went to a typical Czech cafe.  Dave had Goulash with dumplings.  They brought it as  big round bread (dumplings) on a plate, and then a dark gravy with hunks of meat (Dave thinks it was venison) in a metal container with a fondue candle underneath it to keep it warm.

Czech Dumplings. When I asked one Czech person what is famous Czech cousine, he said, "Oh dumplings, of course." I would have to say, they are pretty good.

They had many Greek dishes and I had chicken gyro with a good Greek Yogurt.  I am seeing more and more on TV at home about Greek Yogurt, and how good it is for you.  This is the first time I have had it, along with on the plane on the way over when they served it for breakfast with fruit — much healthier than our processed yogurt.

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Dave has been working on his webinar which he has to do at 3am this morning.  He does it every Tuesday night at 6pm PST — so that means 3am in Prague.  I have just been walking around the hotel area and Wenceslas Square, but tomorrow we plan to take an organized tour so we will have a guide to tell us what we are looking at.
As we have tried to engage the waiters in conversation, they do not really understand what we are asking.  So they know how to communicate with the customers regarding the meals they are ordering, but don’t fluently communicate in English.  The same with the staff at the front desk.  Dave asked them for a restaurant, since we were going at 10:30pm.  After listening to him, as we started out the door, I asked Dave what he said — “I don’t know” was his answer.  So I guess it goes both ways.
There is a group here from AMA Waterways, spending a few Pre-days of their Pre-cruise for their river cruise.

I (Luelle) found this on my walking tour today. Tomorrow, we'll go check it out. I would say Prague definitely has plenty to keep a tourist busy for 3 or 4 days at the beginning or end of a River Cruise.

One of the main reasons I wanted to visit Prague was to find out if I would recommend it to my clients, and if so — should they only do it as a pre-event of their cruise — or is it easily done on their own — and how do they get to the ship from here?  Flying in is a piece of cake, but our next adventure is the railroad to Dresden, and then for Dave to take the RR to Passau, while I am doing the ordinary and flying to Munich to have Uniworld pick me up and take me to the ship in Passau.

BTW:  Most of these photos are taken with Dave’s camera and  the resolution is huge.    That means that there’s a lot more picture than it looks like and if you want to see more detail … just click on the photo.   If it hasn’t been compressed it will expand for you.