Dresden

Published Categorised as Germany, Travel 1 Comment on Dresden

elbe

I spent a week in Dresden. When I wasn’t work­ing, I was explor­ing, either alone, or with my co-work­er Hazel. The city was completely flattened in the Second World War (point­lessly in my opin­ion- it happened right at the end of the war, and Dresden wasn’t an indus­tri­al target). The DDR regime didn’t do much to restore the old town centre, but after reuni­fic­a­tion it was all put back togeth­er as much as possible as it was before (they kept a lot of the stones in a ware­house). The the city is a strange mix of restored Baroque, super-spruced up restored build­ings, dilap­id­ated build­ings wait­ing to be restored, and randomly spaced gaps of bomb sites that haven’t been built on yet. The setting of the city is along the River Elbe- you can see the wide banks left empty here- it’s prone to flood­ing. The local accent also sounds very much like a Brummie speak­ing German.

street

Most of the old town centre looks like this- with the excep­tion of a huge super-modern shop­ping centre by the main train station.

church

Hazel church

Hazel by a church in Rade­beul.

chimney 1

A lot of the indus­tri­al chim­neys along the river have been painted in these blue and green stripes to blend in with the attract­ive river setting better. I like the effect.

chimney 2

houses

There’s a lot of feel­ing of space in Dresden. It’s a big univer­sity city, but it’s not partic­u­larly densely popu­lated.

plattbauen

A block of commun­ist era flats half-way through being renov­ated.

archaeology

An archae­olo­gic­al dig in the town centre, show­ing 17th century houses.

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