May 16 - Waldsassen

We left Dresden that Friday. We were up early again, this time even earlier than the owner of the villa. She had shown us the kitchen of the house (on the bottom level) and we just went down there and put together our own breakfast. I didn't know how to use her coffee machine, which was just as well since my husband thought their coffee was too strong as well. But we found the breads, cheese and jam, and the fruit was already on the table, so we just made do with all of that. When the villa's owner did come downstairs, we were already finished eating and had begun to tidy up the kitchen. When we paid our bill before leaving, she didn't charge us for that day's breakfast being that we put it together ourselves.

During breakfast, we talked about yesterday's Historical Green Vault and all of its treasures. Amazing, the art objects that can be collected from the around the globe when you have a limitless trove of money. Before going into the Green Vault, all the women had to secure their purses into lockers, and all coats and jackets had to be removed. The only thing you could carry into the Green Vault with you were your eyeglasses and some tissues, and the little key for the locker. Nothing else, no exceptions. And there were two sets of double-locked, double-sealed doors going into the Green Vault and coming out of it.... I would imagine that while you were inbetween the two sets of doors, you were being watched on camera to make sure your hands were empty and your pockets weren't full. My husband said "Beam me up, Scotty!" as we got into the first set of locked glass doors, and I gave him a look and hoped that the German-speaking guards didn't think that meant "Quick, grab everything you can!"

Before driving away from Dresden, we took the ferry to the other side of the Elbe and went to see the Pillnitz Castle, which we looked at from the villa's side of the river each night as we had dinner. Beautiful grounds here at this castle, and there was a walking path which we followed and we were rewarded with a duck pond and a stone gazebo hidden in the woods. Pillars held marble statues by the pond, wooden benches were set around it, and we just sat there and watched the most beautiful orange and white ducks sitting at the edge of the water. The inside of the Pillnitz hasn't been restored very much, but the outside was beautiful, and the landscaping all around the castle was just perfectly flower-filled.

Our next stop was a small town called Waldsassen. We found a very small hotel in the center of the town and we arranged a room for just one night. This hotel room was filled with painted furniture and fluffy quilts and oversized pillows. It looked like a room in a dollhouse, or a little girl's playhouse. Very charming, no matter how "chick" it would look to a man. The town itself was so small that we walked all around it before dinner as well as after. There were a lot of Italians in this town, who spoke fluent German, of course, as well as Italian. Lots of Italians meant a lot of Italian restaurants, so we picked a small one for dinner. Their specialty was individual pizzas. I chose spinach and cheese, my husband chose pepperoni. We both thought that pepperoni meant the thin slices of Italian salami that we're used to.

Not so in Waldsassen. Pepperoni meant green peppers, and my husband just hates green peppers, or peppers of any color. The owner of the restaurant walked proudly to our table with our two little pizzas, then saw the look on my husband's face as he saw all the chopped-up green peppers on the top of his pizza. It took us six seconds of language-Charades to figure out what happened, and the owner whisked away my husband's pizza, put together a "real" pepperoni pizza, and brought it out again, apologizing all the way. Before we left, my husband paid the man for both of the pizzas, and went through language-Charades once again because the Italian didn't want to take the extra money.

In Waldsassen, there is a huge basilica and a very large historical library. They are side by side, near the center of the town. The basilica is one of the most beautiful churches I've ever seen, but I found myself saying that about every church, cathedral, basilica in Germany. This particular basilica has a glorious main altar, plus numerous side altars all around the church. At every side altar, there is a glass coffin filled with the skeletal remains of a great knight, bishop, or exalted hero. The skeleton is dressed in the person's most regal garments and surrounded by their favorite treasures. Beautiful and eerie at the same time.

In the attached Klosterbibliothek (church library), we walked up a massive, ornately carved flight of stairs and found ourselves surrounded by wooden shelved filled with centuries-old volumes of hand-written and hand-illustrated books. The floor of the library was original (as was everything else in there) and we had to put oversized soft slippers over our shoes so we could walk around the wood flooring without scratching it. This library's ceiling was as ornately painted as a cathedral, the shelves and the carved wood statues around the room were so striking and creative and overwhelming that you didn't know where to look first. My husband and I, along with everyone else in the room at the time, just stood there with our jaws dropping at the massiveness of the carvings and the endless shelves filled with these truly priceless books.
My husband and I both love libraries and books, so this bibliothek was a "gift" for both of us.

The town of Waldsassen is only a couple of hours away from the Czechoslovakian border.... we were amazed that we had driven so far. While we walked around the town after dinner, my husband asked a few of the shop owners if they had a laundromat in the village. Again, after some language-Charades, they realized what my husband was asking for, and told him that the town didn't have a "laundry salon." Our next stop would be Munich. Surely in a city that size, there would be a salon for washing clothes. My husband was counting on it, since he had packed enough clothes for half of our trip, fully intending to wash his laundry for the second half of the trip. I had packed clothes that I could rinse out easily and hang up to dry, which I had been doing all along. Sitting in a laundromat, even if it's called something fancy like a laundry salon, is not my idea of what to do on a vacation trip.