Mike's Blog: I went to Dresden Germany once upon a time.

Here are some pictures:

I had to get a picture next to the Deutsche Bank ATM for my brother Brian.

I thought this was a cool plane b/c of the soccer ball on it. Luke liked it too.

I got a chance to walk around a look at different houses in the neighborhood that my hotel was in. I really liked them. The orange one in the middle was one of my favorites. From living in an old farm house, I was thinking that some of the houses (b/c they looked older than my farm house) were probably pretty cold in the winter time. Maybe not.

Germany is really into renewable energy. A lot of the houses had solar cells and when I was flying over Germany I could see a lot of wind turbines (I didn't get any pictures of them though). Also, everything was diesel powered (well everything except for my Mercedes C class rental car--it was a gasser). I got to drive in Germany, on the AutoBahn!! I was doing a cram session on the airplane so that I would know what all of the signs meant. I was especially worried about the ones that had writing on them--I learned that I don't speak German and I for sure don't read it. They cram like 5 words together. Itwouldbelikemenotputtinganyspacesinasentence. They smashed together words just didn't make sense. Just for fun I put in Google "the longest German word", one of the sites I got had the word: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz

It was listed as winning the 1999 longest word of the year (I guess they do an annual survey of all the new words?). As the site explains the word "consisted of 63 letters, 20 syllables, and ten individual words—all to express a law having to do with British beef (Rindfleisch) and the so-called "mad cow disease."

Anyway, I want to echo what William and Samantha have said. You really need to spend more than just a few days in a place to really get a chance to experience it.

I got a chance to go over to an area in Dresden that was bombed in WWII. This area was heavily bombed and most of the historical buildings were destroyed. After the war each city had a choice of either rebuilding like what was there historically or to build new modern buildings. Dresden decided to rebuild in an historical manner. The buildings were amazing. The Semper Opera House is one of the most famous. It was destroyed in 1945, but rebuild was not started until 1977! It was finally finished in 1985. I took a few pictures of it, but really it looks the best at night, so I borrowed a night picture from a website.

Semper Opera House:

Here are a few more pictures of some historical buildings. I'm not 100% sure how many of these were destroyed and rebuilt, but all of them were very impressive. A great site to see.