Dresden: First Impressions

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.