Road Trippin' It.

So today's random blog update takes place from Krakow, Poland. I can't say it's from "lovely" Krakow because I haven't actually had a chance to go see the city yet, but that'll come later today, and there will be another post talking about that.

My girlfriend's parents are in town, and were nice enough to take me and Noel on a little road trip through East Germany and Poland. First stops on our trip were Leipzig and Dresden, one city known for absolutely nothing and the other known for being blasted to smithereens in WWII.

The first stop was at Leipzig. Now I can't honestly say that Leipzig is known for nothing because that's not true. The first major protests to take place against the GDR Regime (German Democratic Republic, or Communist East Germany for you non-history types)happened right here in Leipzig. But other than that, I don't really know much about the city itself, and to be honest, it isn't the most attractive German city I've ever visited. Driving into the city, you get to see nothing but all of the gaudy, uniform Communist-era apartment buildings and structures that helped give the Reds a giant 'F' in architectural creativity. This is also one city (much like Berlin) that doesn't benefit from winter weather or overcast skies, as the more overcast it is, the uglier the city gets. Once we got downtown, we were able to see a bit of old town Leipzig, which was nice, but again, nothing to write home about. If I were going to rank this city on a list of German cities I've visited, I wouldn't put it too much higher than Madgeburg (the Flint, MI of Germany)

Dresden, however, was a different story. We got into Dresden late on Wednesday night, and coming in, I thought it might be more of the same of this city as well. But I was wrong. Downtown (Old town) Dresden was quite impressive. And very beautiful. Old buildings with neo-classical designs found everywhere. Palaces. Churches. Amazing. What impressed me the most was the Frauenkirche. A beautiful church located in the heart of old town. Looking at the Church, you would look at it and marvel and how it somehow managed to survive the bombings of WWII.

Truth is, it didn't. Looking at a postcard not far from the Church, I saw a picture of the church lying in absolute rubble just after the war. The Church, like much of the city, was literally rebuilt from scratch. Dresdeners worked tirelessly to rebuild and restore much of the buildings that helped give the city the nickname of the "Florence on the Elba".

As I've gone through cities like Dresden, and Berlin, it almost makes you sad over the amount of history lost thanks to the Nazis. Here you had a totalitarian regime that was in power for barely 13 years, yet they still managed to wipe out thousands of years of German history because of their own ignorance and aggressiveness. Berlin would easily be on par with Paris and Rome in terms of its beauty if many of the buildings that had been constructed before the war had survived. The Communists took over the East, effectively replacing one dictatorship with another, and did nothing but cheapen the look of much of East Germany. What a shame.

That's all I got for now. Off to explore Krakow a bit for the next couple of days. Will tell you all a bit about what the city is like.

Cheers.