Dresden

Well, I did not make it on the trip to Petrin Hill.  I got mixed up about the meeting place, so I missed the meeting time, but that meant that I was able to get my paperwork done from my passport stuff.  After that, since it was a beautiful day, I went back up to the giant metronome over the city.  I sat up there reading for class and writing postcards to people until sunset.  The sunset was beautiful to see from there, it created a beautiful red glow over the city.  On my way back to the metro, I was able to take some pretty cool shots using a really long exposure over the river, which I really like.  

Yesterday was my trip to Dresden.  The whole time we were there, it was cold and rainy, which made the walking tours not as fun as they could have been.  But, despite that, it was a beautiful city.  Back in WWII, it was horribly bombed, almost completely destroying the city.  There were a few buildings that remained from then, but over all most everything was destroyed.  After the war, they decided to rebuild most of the stuff so that to looked like the originals, which was really cool to see.  Some of the buildings which were brand new, looked just as old as the few that had been standing for long periods of time.  Some of the buildings only got partly destroyed, so they fixed them.  These have obvious patches made into the building, which are also really interesting to see.  Also, one of the buildings that was there, is the Semper Opera house.  It was one of the ones that was destroyed during WWII, but it was so important historically that they rebuilt it to the same floor plan.  According to Z, our guide, this is the most important opera house in the world.  He said that all the other opera houses in this part of Europe are based off of this opera house and that if you ever get a chance to perform there, you would be able to easily perform at any other opera house in the world.  Since I don't really know much about opera, I had never seen one until I got here, I had never heard of it before the trip yesterday.  I am just going to have to talk to someone who knows something about opera and see what they say about it sometime.  Overall, it was a pretty cool trip to a city that seemed really nice from my first impression.  I wish that we had more time to spend there, so I would be able to explore the city a little more and actually get to see the sites when the weather was nice.