Dresden Old Town

After leaving the church, we took the street car into the old city!  As we passed the Grose Garten and Zoo, I had a feeling Dresden was going to be one of my favorite cities in Germany!  Dresden leans more into the classical Renaissance style.  The buildings are stunning and take your breath away. Some elements of the city have changed over the years as Dresden was heavily bombed during WWII, but great efforts were taken to piece back together the city to its original form.  The Frauen Kirche is one example of this as the reconstruction began in 1994 and ended in 2005.  The nickname  "Florence of the North" is appropriately so!  Our first stop was for lunch as we were now starving by this point.  We ate at a restaurant close to the train station called Pizzeria Osteria.  We ordered two pizzas and a side salad.  We should have gotten only one as the pizzas are the sizes are huge! The food was delicious!  Winston had eaten there before as a missionary.  Then we walked towards the Frauen Kirches stopping frequently to check out the shops along the way.   We also stopped at a mural titled The Procession of Princes.  The mural is a 394-foot stucco mural located in the Royal Mews and depicts the parade of Saxony rulers.  Completed in 1876, it miraculously served the bombing in  1945. While the Frauen Kirche is worth a visit, walking along the riverbank also brings great joy.  Every visit to a beautiful city is deserving of ice cream and we visited one of Winston's favorite ice cream places called Confiserie Felicitas which is also a chocolate shop.  He loves this ice cream store not just because the ice cream is so creamy and delicious, but for an extra dollar, you can have the inside of your cone coated with chocolate.  The ice cream really was superior!  While I opted out of the additional chocolate, I did go for a strawberry parfait.  Yummy!  A few other highlights from the day were walking through the Zwinger which is currently under construction, riding the newly built Ferris wheel, and walking through the Grosser Gartens before returning to the church to pick up our car and heading to our hotel.  It was a lovely day!