From Pivo to Bier and Back

Hi All! I'm back in lovely (but windy/rainy) Edinburgh after a fantastic week in Prague. In my last post, I promised I'd write a bit about our day-trip to Dresden. For those of you who don't know where Dresden is (it's OK, I had to look on a map too), it's almost directly south of Berlin, but right on Germany's border with the Czech Republic. More importantly, it's only about 400km from the best place in Germany: Usbeckstraße, Niederzwehren (that's Usbeck St.)!



It was about a 2-hour train ride from Prague to Dresden with Cody and Chris. We shared a cabin with a really nice (and very pretty) Czech girl, Petra, who was on her way to the Dominican Republic.



On the train, I took a bunch of pictures of the towns we passed through. There are some really nice houses buried out in the middle-of-nowhere, CZ. The leaves are changing color now too, so there weren't a shortage of nice views.



Quick history lesson: Dresden was almost completely destroyed in WWII and has since been rebuilt. The architecture there seems very similar to that of Prague (to the untrained eye). The buildings are all very elaborate and the landscaping is really nice.



A river, whose German name I won't even attempt, runs through the North part of the city. We saw a lot of the attractions to the South of the river, but I'll admit, we definitely were lost for a decently long time.




After getting our bearings, we found the old city and went around to each of the buildings in the square. We also saw a group of old German guys singing in the middle of the square - they were pretty great.



We took a break from all our strenuous sight-seeing at a beer garden (you can see it in the above picture with the yellow umbrellas). The local beer-of-choice in Dresden is Feldschlösschen Pilsner which I enjoyed even more than the Pilsner Urquelle of Prague, but it's not quite as good as Kozel (from Prague).

I suppose I should explain the title of this post (via a 3-part analogy):

Pivo : Czech :: Bier : German :: Beer : English




One of my favorite places in Dresden was the Zwinger. The name 'zwinger' means 'interspace' and originates from its location between the city forts. It's now a museum and the large courtyard is really nice to walk around.



The Zwinger courtyard has some very elaborate patterns in the ground, and some really cool passages between the buildings that compose the walls of the courtyard.



All-in-all, it was a really great day-trip and I highly recommend it. The food was delicious - the beer was fantastic - the people were nice - the city was interesting. We were able to use credit cards everywhere, so we didn't have to worry about getting euro, and my mastery of the German language came in very handy (I successfully communicated with a German via pointing and shrieking "CITY??").

My academic advisor, Bill Regli, is in Edinburgh this weekend, so I've been spending some time with him. Maybe my next post will be about Drexel CS overseas. I'm open for suggestions... is there anything you guys would like to know about?