Dresden

We decided to go to Dresden, although we hadn't really planned on it, and it was lucky we did. Dresden was fantastic. We arrived late at night after a long, cramped and boring 7-hour train trip from Munich. Off we went for a snack and ended up eating some really fantastic Chinese food cooked by Vietnamese people in a Hong Kong restaurant - interesting.

It was an early night for us as the night before had been quite a late one. We got up bright and early, feeling very refreshed and began exploring what we soon discovered to be an amazing city with a very rich history. We were staying on 'the other side of the river' which meant we had a short walk to head over to the old city centre. Map in hand we began our journey. We walked over a bridge and in front of us, to our delight, was a fantastic silhouette of the city which looked something like this.














But in 1945 actually looked something like this.





















Dresden was pretty much completely destroyed right near the end of World War II and the city is still in the process of rebuilding itself after the devastation it endured.
Luckily for us a lot of the restoration had already been done and we were able to see some magnificent buildings that look today just as they did before the terrible bombings of 1945.
We spent a few hours wandering through the town and saw the Frauenkirche, the Semperoper (the opera house or theatre), the Kreuzkirche and countless other world heritage listed sights, many which had been completely bombed/burnt to the ground. For lunch we had a bratwurst and an eierpunsch, the Christmas markets were still going in Dresden! Yay!

After a very busy day we left early that evening for Germany's capital city, Berlin.