We had a nice long sleep in this morning before our driver picked us up in Prague from the Hotel. Things have gone a lot smoother with hotels and drivers for this second stage of the tour and by and large the hotels have been reasonably good.
Prague was a great city, and we probably didn't make the most of it that we could have, but it was good to get a few days rest as well. This is meant to be a holiday, after all.
Our train trip to Dresden was uneventful, but scenic. Dresden on the other hand was beautiful, and without a doubt, our favourite place in Europe. We wish we'd spent more time here than we did.
Because we were only there for the one night, we decided to upgrade our hotel room to their deluxe suite, and what an amazing hotel room it was. We had a wide range of accommodation standards in Europe, from the well wallpapered hotel room at Heidelberg to our little piece of Bourgeois decadence in Paris, but the Hotel in Dresden exceeded our expectations.
This final one is the view from our window.
After we'd finished exploring our hotel room we decided to take a quick walk into Dresden itself, by crossing the river. On our way we passed a few lovely sights.
The fountain outside of our window...
A view across the river to the old part of Dresden
This one is a very interesting photo. Next to the walking path they have a big red picture frame and it shows the view of the city of Dresden with a small information panel that shows a famous painting of Dresden made from that very spot.
Once we had crossed the bridge above, we had to decide what to go and see. We had a lot of choice...
The closest was a church, though we are nearly all churched out, we decided we'd visit just one more. We were very lucky because as we entered the bells started tolling to summon mass, so we quickly took a few photo's and left before we got incorporated into catholic mass.
It's hard to believe that Dresden was bombed and nearly totally destroyed in 1944 near the end of WW2. The city has been rebuilt since then to restore it's former glory, and they have done an amazing job.
After we left the church we wondered towards the old royal palace and found some ancient ruins that were in the middle of an archaeological dig. It looks as though the ruins were covered up and built upon. It reminds us of just how much history Europe has, that the historic buildings are built on top of some truly ancient signs of civilization.
We walked past a gallery and thought we'd pop in for a look. Out of chance we asked if they had any pastel paintings, and it's a good thing we did. While the gallery we stopped at didn't, the young lady at the desk was kind enough to direct us to another gallery just around the corner that had "one or two". Off we went.
As we turned the corner we walked past the opera house, and couldn't resist a quick photo of this impressive building.
We finally found the gallery, and this is a photo from near the entrance.
Here I am psycing myself up for the pastel search...
As it turned out, the one or two pastels they referred to must have meant one or two rooms, because as we discovered when we got a map, there were a serious volume of pastel work in this gallery.
Jodie proceeded to fill our 4GB memory card (after she bought a photo licence) and started on the second card. I'm not going to upload them all here, but here's a few of the highlights.
Jodie loved the lace work on this one.
This is the famous "Chocolate Girl" and we both agree that this is the most amazing piece of pastel art we have seen. We disagree on the order of second and third (Jodie like Madame Pompodour from the Lourve and Jason likes the old man pictured below).
Jason's second place award, Jodie gives it 3rd.
This one is pretty amazing too...
After spending an hour or so in this gallery, snapping too many photo's to mention, Jodie bought a few more art books. She was particularly happy with this collection because two of the most amazing artists were both women.
We meandered back to the hotel, via the ice cream wagon (because we thought we'd earned one.
Jodie also thought she'd earned a bubble bath...
Jason has hereby banned Jodie from Bvlgari bubble bath lest she gets completely eaten by the bubble monster...
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