May 14 - Meissen and Dresden

We had breakfast early that Wednesday morning, then we picked up the rental car (conveniently located right near the hotel) and we were on our way. My husband reserved a car with a GPS, to help us get to all the cities, towns and villages he had mapped out for our trip. The GPS spoke to us with a slightly German/English-accented voice, so we named her "Greta," which sounded like a solid German name. There were a couple of times that my husband lost patience with Greta and called her other non-German names, but for the most part, we were happy to have the GPS along for the ride.

Our first stop was Meissen. We found St. Nicholas Church, a tiny, tiny two-room church tucked into a corner of the woods near a village-- the church was filled with a porcelain altar as well as beautiful life-sized porcelain statues of saints. For a very small church, on the outskirts of the town, it was breathtakingly beautiful. The stone altar of the church was bulit in the year 980, I believe.

We also went to the Meissen Porcelain factory and museum...... filled to the brim with everything imaginable that could possibly be made out of Meissen porcelain. Of course, the museum had a gift shop-- filled with everything expensive made of Meissen. I had planned to buy a tea cup or two (and have them shipped home to avoid possible breakage). I changed my mind quickly when I saw that two tea cups/saucers would be nearly $500 (American dollars, not Euros). I told my husband that I had more than enough tea cups.

We had lunch at the restaurant in the Meissen museum--- a pretty little cafe with bistro tables and sweet little chairs. In the center of each table-- a Meissen sugar and creamer set, filled with sugar cubes and cream: six hundred dollars worth of Meissen on each table. When our lunch was served, the cups, saucers, and plates were all Meissen. I calculated that our two place settings were would cost about $1600. We were extremely careful as we ate.

There was a gorgeous white castle with a red-tiled roof in Meissen that we were able to tour, as well as a beautiful cathedral. Time and again, as we walked into churches during our trip, we would be overwhelmed by the beauty and painstaking details of these tributes to everything holy. Gorgeous and beautiful and breath-taking will be words that will be repeated over and over again, unless I dig out the Thesaurus.

After Meissen, we stopped in Morritzburg to tour the castle there, which is on its own little island. We walked across a little bridge to get to it. Quite an imposing castle, very stately and beautiful, and the outside of the castle walls are lined with life-sized bronze statues. The castle's exterior seemed to be golden, and once again, a red-tiled roof. The most memorable room in this castle was "The Feather Room"-- all of the tapestries and fabrics in this bedroom are made of birds' feathers. All different sizes and colors, woven into the most intricate designs. Outstandingly creative..... I can't even imagine how many hours, days, weeks, months, years all that work could have taken the royal seamstresses.

Then on to Dresden, to the Therese Malten Villa. We stayed at this guesthouse for two nights... wonderful villa in a quiet community on the Elbe River. The villa was built as a private home in 1893, and is what we would call a large Victorian. Each of the bedrooms had a private bath, and each of the two floors had a lovely sitting/reading room just off the center hallway. We could see the Elbe from our window, and our bedroom had a private balcony where we could sit and watch the river. Breakfast was included with our stay, but for our dinners, there was a restaurant within walking distance, set right on the Elbe. The Fahrhaus, built in 1860, served delicious fish, local meats, homegrown vegetables, and homemade desserts. We ate there two nights in a row, watching the ferry going back and forth across the Elbe.

There were birds singing in the trees all along the Elbe while we stayed in Dresden-- and the birds' singing sounded exactly like the birds in the German "cuckoo" clocks. When we found someone who knew enough English, we discovered that there are real cuckoo birds in the forests there. So it isn't a coincidence that the birds in the cuckoo clocks make a cuckooooo sound. We never did actually see the birds, but we heard them up in the trees often enough that we grew to miss the sound when there weren't any cuckoo birds around in some of the other villages.

As we were driving from Leipzig to Meissen to Dresden, we passed hundreds of thousands of fields filled with tiny yellow flowers. I thought farmers were cultivating those flowers for sale, but we soon found out that these "Butterblooms" are a wildflower, and the farmers dedicate some of their fields to these flowers for the simple reason that they grow easily and plentifully, and they're just appreciated for their beauty. I cannot even describe how beautiful it was so see miles and miles of yellow, for as far as your eyes can see.

Towards the end of our trip, I found a small patch of butterblooms near one of the parking lots near a church. I picked just a sprig of the yellow flowers and pressed them between a paper napkin. I took them home, and I have it now just sitting on one of the shelves of my curio cabinet. The butterbloom stems are pressed as flat as flat can be, but the brightness of the flowers are still blindingly yellow and bright.

My husband and I loved Dresden. The feeling of the town, the river, the community that the villa was nestled in.... we loved it all. It was hard to imagine that the city of Dresden, the very cathedral that we had visited that afternoon, had been blasted to bits by the bombings during WWII. For most of our trip, when I thought of the horrors of WWII, then looked at the beauty that is Germany today, it was difficult to fathom that a country so rich in royal and social history, so steeped in religious traditions, could have been a part of all of that horror.

I found myself thinking of what my husband's mother always said.... No matter what happens in this world, life does go on in a sensible way. And in the Germany of today, it certainly has.