Dresden, Germany ... Dec. 7, 2008

We woke up early and headed back to the old town of Dresden. Since we had arrived in Dresden, we had not yet actually seen the city in the daylight (we arrived late afternoon when it was already dark and we left Saturday for the temple while it was still dark). It is such a beautiful city, and one would hardly know that what we were experiencing was a rebuilt city. They somehow managed to maintain the character in the reconstruction of what I would have expected the pre-WWII city to look like. We visited the Semperoper. This is one building that although destroyed during the Allied bombing was actually rebuilt in 1985, exactly as the original. I guess the Communists got one thing right (or at least didn't hinder this one thing that was right).
We ran across Santa Claus and strolled the slowly waking city before heading to church at the Dresden ward meeting house about 10 minutes from downtown. As I have mentioned before, strolling European city centers early in the morning, and particularly Sunday mornings is one of my favorite things to do. Nothing is open, no people around, just you and architecture and the imagination of what these places were like hundreds of years ago.
After church (and a disasterously behaved Ashley), we drove back to Budapest.