besucher.

Diane came up to visit on Saturday.  She got in at 11am, I met her at the train station and we walked back.  We ate lunch in the Mensa, met up with some of my American friends and decided to go play volleyball.  We spent the afternoon in this sweet park on the Elbe.  We played volleyball, soccer and danced in the rain.  Then all of us went to dinner at this little Chinese place around the corner.  It was crazy, we had 5 Americans there!  Hung out with some people at night, but called it early because we spontaneously decided to go to Dresden on Sunday.  There is another American girl named Jingyun, who is from Detroit, but goes to school at MIT; anyway, she lives on my floor and invited us to go with her.  So we decided, eh, what the heck, lets do it.

It was 8 hours worth of train riding for 5 hours in the city.  I think it was worth it; the city was beautiful and we actually had great weather.  The minute we got on the train to come home it started down-pouring!  Dresden has two parts to the city, the “Alter Stadt” and the “Neu Stadt”.  The old part of the city was completely destroyed after WWII and is slowly being rebuilt and replicated to how it was before.  So all the buildings are not the originals, but identical to them.  I think that’s pretty sweet!  In the new part of the city there was a mini “Taste of Chicago” going on.  All the restaurants and shops had little booths outside and were selling food and drink in small portions for cheaper prices.  It felt like we were locals just enjoying the festival.  We tried the famous local dessert, a eggy cheesecake thing called Dresdener Eierschecke, and had a Bratwurst to make us feel truly German.  Both were really good!

Today work was good, I’m pretty much done with the first leg of this busy work stuff.  I started doing a little bit more complicated analyses and at one point I was thinking, wow, I’m actually kind-of doing engineering.  Tomorrow I think Professor Neumann is supposed to come and check-up on me.  So we’ll see how that goes!

Here are some pictures from Dresden.

This first picture is me inside the ‘Zwinger’.  This was originally a palace, but now it has museums in each of the four wings.  Zwinger means the no-man’s-land running along the city wall, so this area was once totally empty.  The prince elector that ruled here in Saxony was also was the king of Poland for a while.  If you can see on the left, there is a huge crown.  On the crown there are 4 golden eagles, symolizing the Polish royalty.

the Frauenkirche or ‘Church of our Lady’, which when built, was the largest protestant church in Germany.

in the main square, called the theaterplatz.

This mural is longer than a football field and is called the ‘Fuerstenzug’ or the Parade of Nobles.

my lovely travel companions 🙂