2 posts tagged “dresden”
Hey there, I recently went on a trip to Dresden. Well, first I was in Munich to see Blonde Redhead live ('twas awesome), rented a bike and rode it around all day Monday before heading in the night train to Dresden. I'll post a few pics from that trip at the bottom of this post. But since you've all seen Munich before, I wanted to give you a glimpse of Dresden, a once beautiful city destroyed in a war, and then restored to its former beauty, sort of like a beast whose fatal wound had been healed. :)
So anyway, I'm not going to bore you with a lot of text, and I'm not even going to post a lot of pictures. Just a few I really like. If you want to see all the pics from Dresden I uploaded, scroll down a bit to where you see a list of folders, and click the one entitled "Dresden"; I've given captions and little stories to most of the pics, to clue you in on what you're looking at. In case you didn't already know, I've been trying to organize a lot of the pictures, music and videos I post at this blog, and you can get to them quickly via that list of folders. If there is anything that isn't organized that you think should be, let me know and I'll see if I can work it out.
So, here's a description of Dresden in pictures:
And just a few of Munich:
So I was in Munich and Dresden these past few days. I've been to Munich before but never Dresden. It was nice. I had a really great time in spite of being alone. It seemed I was making myself laugh all throughout the day yesterday. So while you can expect the usual post with lots of pictures (not so many as Ireland, thankfully), there were three things in particular that made me think and feel three very different ways, and thought them worthy of individual note:
(P.S. For those of you who really hate all those picture posts, be comforted that I won't going on any more big trips for at least a month, so any pics I post for a while will be few in number.)
1. Waiting for the #11 tram to see the old Jewish cemetary, a man-boy nearby threw an empty beer bottle across the street, intending to land it in the island of grass across the way, only overshot just a bit and landed it on the curb, breaking it into a thousand pieces which ended up lying in the street, directly in the path of oncoming traffic. Every car afterwards had to slow to nearly stopping to avoid the shards of glass, a mistake for which the man-boy seemed only momentarily ashamed. All the sudden I was brimming with a fiery angst, hatred for this kind of inconsiderate endangering of others, and for those responsible, mixed with the shame of being too much of a coward to say anything to the offender, for fear of how he and his friend with him might violently take out their own inner-shame on me. I stood there burning while I watched them pass, sticking their chests out to impress anyone who had noticed their blunder. I imagined heroic scenes in which I was somehow capable of "teaching these punks a lesson", either by wrestling them to the ground or talking them down to point that they were crossing the road to pick up the glass themselves. Only these fantasies soon gave way to another form of shame: the shame of being consumed with vengeful, smelting self-righteousness, wishing terrible things on the heads of the perpetrators, rather than the grace afforded to all of us in the Lord's love and sorrow for any who would shame themselves in this way. Rather than experiencing the impulse to love him -- to speak a word of kindness to quail his foolishness -- and act on it, my impulse was to hurt him and shame him. I don't think it is wrong to be angry at such an idiotic act. There is a sort of righteous anger that can burn when others' safety is put in jeopardy. But the trick is that I recognized two impulses, one which resembled this righteous anger only in the perverted form of wanting to hurt, which I felt, and the other which would have been the Lord working within me to spread love rather than hate, which I didn't feel -- and recognizing both, I acted on neither.
2. At the same stop waiting for the same train, after the two punks had gone, I noticed a young teenage girl standing nearby with a few friends, wearing a gray starred zip hoodie that zipped all the way to the chin -- quite the cool piece of attire I noted, and reflected on how the style of clothes I would have loved to have worn at that age, and after which I actually did seek in any thrift store I came across, has truly come into fashion over a decade later. However, had it been a mode of fashion then as it is now, I probably would've spurned the look simply on the basis that it was the mode and fashion, given my inclination to declination at the time (which persists). Having boarded the tram and getting out but two stops later, this thought was only reaffirmed for me when I saw another young girl wearing the very same style of hoodie!
3. Later in the day, walking around the beautiful city center, I came upon a group of some fifty-odd tourists standing before the Dresden Frauenkirche (one of the city's main attractions), only they were all facing away from it, peering intently toward a restaurant across the small street. Everyone among them was silent as they all stood still and focused, apparently listening to whatever it was their tour guide was speaking into a microphone, which fed into the small, nearly invisible earpieces each tourist was wearing, creating quite an eerie and comical appearance of a mass of people standing and staring at a wall in complete, silent awe. I walked in front of the group, only sort of realizing what was going on as I was passing through, but couldn't help the huge grin that came to my face at the thought of all those intent staring faces, my disruption of their gaze by walking in front, and whatever hopeful ideas the proprietor of the adjacent restaurant could have been having with all these people staring in on his restaurant (though I think really they were looking at some nondescript sign telling something about the old city, directly next to the restaurant).
