Leipzig and Dresden

For an organist and a chorister, a trip to Leipzig is a pilgrimage.  J.S. Bach is buried at St. Thomas Kirche, where he directed music.  A noonday service was in progress as we entered the church;  the acoustics were wonderful. 

Leipzig itself has been well restored.  We enjoyed a  lunch of curry-wurst on the market square.  The story of this oddly famous dish is that a post-war German cook had only leftover British (army) curry to spice up the wurst he was able to scrounge. 

Noralynn suffered a fall here on uneven pavement.  Her arm was sore and swollen for a few days, but is now healing nicely.





We stayed at a hotel in Dresden convenient to the downtown. Most buildings in the heavily bombed city had been restored, or at least rebuilt in a tastefully imitative style.  But one communist era building had been retained on the market square, complete with mural. 

Dresden teems with churches, and porcelain.  The Catholic cathedral  has a chapel with a memorial Pieta and altar made of porcelain:  the flames on the altar are a reminder of the city's destruction.  There's also a block-long porcelain mural in which the historic leaders of Saxony are on parade.

 

We had an afternoon appointment to visit the "Green Vault":  the treasure collection of the Saxon kings.  No pictures allowed, but the number and richness of the objects was overwhelming (we returned the next day for a visit to the "overflow" collection).    

 After our visit we strolled around the city, admired the view, and then settled into a gemütliche dinner:  I had matjes (herring).

The next day, after the return visit to the Green Vault collection, we wandered some more, including a visit to the Zwinger palace.  Gerhard successfully hunted down a favorite piece of cake, and the visit was capped by a short organ concert at the Kreuzkirche.