Dresden, Germany

 Our last road trip from Frankfurt was to Dresden.  This city was much prettier and inspiring than I thought it was going to be.  Dresden was on the East side of the Berlin Wall, in Soviet (communist) power for 45 years until the Berlin Wall came down in 1988.  This Germany city lived completely different than Frankfurt...it was like walking back in time about 30 years, everything was outdated.  My oldest brother, Robb, served his mission here and arrived here the day after the Berlin Wall came down.  It was very cool to visit and think about how different the city looked then while he served his mission than now.  The city center was DESTROYED by bombings during WWII but was never rebuilt until the past 10 years.  So they finally decided to rebuild it and it was just beautiful new buildings built to look like the old German architecture!

 The church pictured on the left, FrauenKirche, was my favorite part of Dresden.  Historically it is very interesting.  Do you see how some of the bricks are very black in comparison to the other white bricks?  Well, this church was destroyed completely during the war and remained a pile of rubble until the year 2000 when it was rebuilt.  They used as much of the old building that they could and used the blue prints as a template for its reconstruction.  They used about 1/3 of the original stones and materials in the reconstruction, hence why the stones are such different colors randomly.  The inside was beautiful as well and the dome was amazing!

 This wall  is called the Furstenzug,  and another cool part in the city center of Dresden.  It was one landmark of the few that survived the war. It is a large mural of a mounted procession of the princes of Saxony over a thousand years, made out of 25,000 porcelain tiles.   Because these tiles were fired at extreme heat when originally built, it withstood the heat and fire that took place during the bombings of WWII. 

 Just another pretty architectual church in Dresden.

I fell in love with this street as I looked down on it.  It looked so romantic and very European!  Isn't it beautiful?  We ate dinner here in a real German Restaurant before heading out to Freiburg to stay at the Temple Housing, where the Dresden Temple is located.