Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Leaving Prague wasn’t as straightforward as we expected.  We’d bought train tickets to Dresden, Germany, a few days before but when we arrived at the Prague railway station on Thursday morning we discovered a train strike had been called and all trains for the day were cancelled!  This wasn’t what we wanted to hear – it was warm and humid and we were lugging backpacks.  We spent the morning looking for alternatives and finally at the international bus station secured the last two tickets on a bus from Budapest scheduled to stop in Prague at 5pm on its way to Berlin via Dresden.  That gave us time for one last wander through Prague’s fantastic old town centre before returning to the bus station and ultimately getting into Dresden at 9.30pm, by which time we were both more than ready for a shower and lie down.

The famous baroque centre of Dresden was controversially destroyed by Allied bombing in the final months of World War II, but extensive rebuilding in the decades since has restored much of the city centre to its former magnificence.  We started our day in Dresden with a walk through the 1728 fortress Zwinger, then past the Semperoper (Opera House) to the Schloss, a huge palace now containing museums.  We inspected only one of the latter; Grunes Gewolbe (the Green Vault) filled with one of the world’s finest collections of jewel-encrusted objects including the world’s largest green diamond.  Outside we walked along the impressive Furstenzug, a 102 metre long tiled mural depicting a royal procession, before inspecting the interior of the Church of Our Lady, one of Germany’s greatest protestant churches.  Out the front there’s a large statue of Martin Luther.

There was quite a crowd of tourists in Dresden and we joined many of them for lunch along the cafe-lined streets running along the Elbe River that cuts Dresden in two, the old town centre to the south, the new town to the north.