After breakfast (where we met most of our travel companions once more) we slowly headed out to play tourist in Dresden. The first stop was the ticket office for the Caspar David Friedrich exhibit in the Albertinum. 2025 is the 250th birthday of the painter, one of the most well know of the romantic period. He lived in Dresden for much of his life and several of his paintings are of the area we just visited. It was fascinating to learn how different his style is from so many others, for example, human figures in his paintings never face the viewer. Here's one of his more famous paintings, Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer above the see of fog).
After buying tickets to the exhibit for the afternoon, we walked to the Catholic church, where we enjoyed a free organ concert (Krebs, Bach, etc.) which was quite wonderful and very well attended! James snapped this picture of the nave and altar.
From there, we walked to the starting point of the hop-on-hop-off tour, bought tickets, and walked to the bus. The beginning of the trip was a bit of a muddle, with a group of pensioners blocking everyone from boarding the bus even though they wanted to go on the next bus as a group. But finally we were settled, and enjoyed the view from the seats on the top floor (it wasn't raining!) watching the world go by. At stop #11, we hopped off to walk along the Großer Garten (Big Garden) to the botanical garden, which was quite small but free and had an enjoyable rock garden and also some blooming Herbstzeitlose (a fall crocus).
When we boarded the bus again, we realize that we were lucky: this time we had live narration by an opinionated and funny Saxon gentlemen and not simply a prerecorded tour. We drove through the suburbs past 3 castles and other interesting buildings, including the prison where Putin used to work. However, when we were back in Neustadt the bus stopped for a 20 minute break, so we decided to walk back to the hotel, past a lot of interesting stores.
Back at the hotel, Renate had 4 glasses of water and then we headed off to the Albertinum with our timed ticket to finally see the exhibit. We arrived a bit early so we payed a visit to the museum cafe and fortified ourselves with some excellent cake, then it was time to see the paintings. Regrettably very few of the paintings were of the Sächsische Schweiz, but the exhibit was well curated and asked interesting questions. James was especially impressed by the picture below, called Fog, which shows a flock of birds flying around a thatched cottage at sunset in fog. There seemed to be a kind of lonely melancholy in the picture, which, he felt, summarized the emotional impact of David's work.
After finishing the tour of the exhibit, from the Albertinum we walked across the bridge to Neustadt and got a front row seat at a cafe on a large pedestrian mall, where we ordered some supper and enjoyed watching the people stroll by.
