Easter in East Germany

For my annual "Get out of Holland for Easter" trip, I decided to go to Dresden. I chose Dresden, because the weather forecast there was just as bad as the rest of europe, I hadn't been there before, and I couldn't afford the airfare to Sicily.

I spent the first night in Wittenberg. The reason for that choice was so I could see the door (or successor to the door) where Martin Luther nailed his treatises.

From there, I stopped in Dessau to see the Bauhaus school (yes, it had its own school) and the houses of Kadinsky, Klee, and others who were professors there. The houses were not very appealing, as with most bauhaus architecture. They felt very dreary and impersonal, with quite small rooms. Next stop was Leipzig, which has a very attractive downtown. I visited the museum, where they had a big exhibition by someone who was probably famous and had a thing for taking pictures of Claudia Schiffer.

Day 2 was devoted to Dresden itself. On my walk downtown, I came across the most unusual Easter egg hunt I've seen. All along a main shopping street outside the tourist area, people were dumping plastic Easter eggs out of the 2nd storey windows. Not a few Easter eggs, thousands of Easter eggs, by the bucket and trash bag-full. Kids were running everyone to collect as many as they could. It was pretty amusing. The historic part of Dresden was really nice. It has been beautifully restored, especially the big church. The musuems are very good too.


Contrary to the forecasts, the sun came out for most of the day, which made everything that much better.

Day 3 was traveling to places around Dresden. I went to a couple palaces, but the highlights were Baulitz and Schloss Moritzburg. Baulitz is a little walled town perched on a hill above the Spree. There isn't a whole lot to really do there, but the town is quite well preserved and it felt nice to walk around and look at it in the light snow that was falling.

The second highlight was Moritzburg, a saxon hunting castle. When I got there, they were having a big pottery fair in front, so I was able to buy a few nice things.

The last day was mostly devoted to driving back, but before that, I visited the Glaserne Manufaktur, the VW factory made entirely out of glass. It is a factory like I have never seen. It is a place where people in white lab coats build cars on spotless hardwood floors, not a place where people in greasy overalls put stuff together. Quite cool.


As usual, the pictures can be found here, here, and here.


Tidbit: At dinner the first night, the waiter who was speaking english brought a basket of bread and a dish of schmaltz to spread on it. As he set it down he said, "This is...uh..."
"schmaltz," I replied.
"Yes! Schmaltz. You know schmaltz? It is..."
Whereby I said, "schmaltz is one of those things I'm happier not knowing exactly what's in it"