Days 3 and 4!

I don’t even know how to cover the past two days; it’s manageable, but kind of hard to recount! Yesterday, we woke up and had a great German breakfast (meats, cheeses, bread, hard-boiled eggs, fruit, yogurt with granola *it has a specific name, which I can’t remember* and my personal favorite…BANANA JUICE!) then headed out to the grocery store. Everything is pretty normally priced with a lot of American brands and/or strange names for American products. Purchasing groceries can be kind of stressful when it comes to checking out, though. They are really trying to hustle and move you through the line. I bought a huge (like 2 liter) bottle of water, two fruit smoothies, and nutella-to-go for 3 euro. It was a lot of fun exploring there! After the trip, we went to the Mensa (cafeteria) where I had my first schnitzel! It was chicken and came with a couple of lemon slices and French fries with an awesome mushroom sauce. I loved it! The next adventure was a long one to the giant mall including an IKEA! When I was checking out (picture the same stressful situation), I dropped ALL of my change out of my zipper-pocket on my passport holder. Typical American: holding up the line. Oh well. Eventually, we went to the Opera House only to discover our tickets were for tonight (Friday night), so we eventually just got ice cream and played the part of the wandering tourists.

This morning, we toured a lot of Old Dresden and New Dresden with Michael’s old German teacher: Iris! Most of the buildings in Old Dresden are reconstructions because of the bombing in February of 1945. We all kind of felt like jerks during some of the stories about reconstruction. Unfortunately, Dresden was bombed right at the end of the war. It was not really a tactical move…no military presence was there, no factories or installations. The bombing on Dresden (and resulting fire) killed 25,000 people: almost all civilians. It’s hard to hear such a tragic story and not think, “Why?” Although, war is war. I’m not going to try to question it, but as Americans, we have to sort of shudder and keep moving. For all we know there could have been reason to believe someone or something tactical could come from bombing Dresden, but in the end it wasn’t tactical. Anyway, most of the buildings were built by Augustus of Saxony, and (because I’m terrible with German spelling and pronunciation) I’ll use the English translations. We toured a Catholic church Augustus built (even though he didn’t really claim a religion) and the Church of Our Lady. We saw the school of Art, a couple of different houses Augustus built for his son (and mainly for his mistresses), parts of the palace, another church in which Martin Luther preached in 1590, among other things. It was an almost four hour walking tour, and we covered about three miles! Afterwards, we ate at the Mensa again, then some of us went to Hauptbenhof (the train station area) and bought some necessities! We ate ice cream again over on the other side of the Elbe, then waited outside the Opera House to see Mussorgsy’s Boris Godunov!

We had FRONT ROW SEATS thanks to Michael and Meg (I’m assuming). It was in the native Russian, with tiny German translations projecting at the top of the Opera House, so it was pretty much guessing for the plot. It would get comical at times not knowing the plot and wondering why trampy girls suddenly appeared, or why a man singing in falsetto with a wig would occasionally outburst in song, then slink to the background. Anyways, the music. was. beautiful. I don’t think anyone in the entire huge pit missed a note, and the singing was phenomenal…even if it was in Russian! We got to meet one of Michael and Meg’s friends from FSU who had had a pretty large role in the opera. Afterwards, a bunch of us had our first German McDonalds! When I asked for honey mustard, the cashier just smiled and said, “Eh. No honey? Just ze mustard.” It was pretty similar to American McD’s, though minus the tiny, tiny drinks! Over the past two days, we've walked over ten miles, so we've gotten a pretty good perception of people and distances. A couple of things some of the trip folks have noticed: If we don’t speak in English whilst passing groups of German people, they assume we’re German, and will A. Not stare and B. Talk to us in German occasionally. Another thing: if you point or use a mixture of German AND English, it gets your point across better than just the English. And C. It’s really hard to tell if people are laughing with you or at you, but to be honest…it’s almost always funny anyway. When you’re in a department store trying to use sign language and noises to demonstrate the word ‘hair dryer’ to a worker who clearly does not speak English, it’s hard not to laugh at yourself! Well, I'm sleepy. Off to bed! Auf Wiedersehn!