Dresden

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We did a bit of jaunt around England and Germany before Kate's KBS conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

After our visit with Martin and Tina in Oppenheim we took a direct train from Frankfurt to Dresden, in the former East Germany, where our No. 1 son Chris (Martin's son), his wife Amy, and their three kids (Charlotte, Sebastian and Emily) live. Chris picked us up at the train station (he also drove us to Berlin airport at the end of our visit). We stayed in a nearby hotel.

On the first night we had a BBQ outdoors at their home which looks over nearby vineyards on the hillside above them. This was also Charlotte's 8th birthday. We had last seen her when she was just a newborn in Nottingham (see notes on Sheffield, 2017). The children were a little shy but we soon made friends. Sebastian reminds us so much of the impish but fun child Chris was when we first met all those years ago in Nierstein, 1994.

On the Wednesday Chris and Amy took us into Dresden to see the Neumarket town square which has been restored. The kids were off to a nearby school. You may know that Dresden was fire-bombed (February 1945) during WWII; a terrible act of war on a civilian population that today would/should count as a war crime. The horror of it all is memorialized in Kurt Vonnegut's book Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969). I recall reading the book many years ago.

When East and West Germany were reunited (1989-90) a lot of money from the west was used to restore Dresden to it's past and current glory. The Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), an iconic Lutheran church in the Neumarkt square, is famously restored -- it was an international effort (1994-2005). It had been completely destroyed in the fire-bombing of 1945, left as a pile of rubble and a memorial to war (and evil of the west) during the communist years. You can see the stained old stones against the new. These days it's a memorial to the reconciliation of the two warring sides.

We shared an Italian lunch on the Neumarkt square and tromped around a bit. The square is huge and there's lots to see. There's a grand opera house, lots of statuary and fine buildings. Were we younger we would have enjoyed wandering around this part of the city. It's obvious that it was an important and rich powerhouse before the wars. It's pedestrian friendly with lots to see including a river, the Elbe, running through it.

Kate wrote a note to Chris and Amy describing our long standing relationship:

"I'm just going through our pictures from Germany and Glasgow and looking at some of the pictures of our visit with your family and it came into my mind — how did we get so lucky to have Christopher for a friend? And then through you, we get to spend time with Amy and your wonderful children. The pictures reminded me what a lovely time we had with you and how much fun your kids were (they seemed to really fancy Reg)."

We hope to see our Dresden family again on this, or that, side of the big pond while we still can.

Ps. the lovely photo of Kate with the Frauenkirche above was taken by Amy.