Day 12 - 11th May - Dresden to Prague

I slept in til 7am today! Woot! Altho Stu woke up feeling nauseus which wasn't very pleasant for him :(

Went down for a big breakfast (also not included with the room tariff - talk about a tight-ass hotel...)

And then we hit the streets of Dresden for a general wander about the place. Was all very nice. Except I had to go to the loo after a while and got frustrated cause there aren't any toilets in Germany. There are so few that they could all be printed on the tourist map of the entire city!!! But even with the map I still couldn't find one :( After some more wandering we did eventually find one. Now Stu had told me that while you have to pay for toilets, they are clean and well kept. Well this is the first one that I lowered myself to pay for and it was crap!! It didn't even have a seat, just small plastic runners that only covered part of the cold metal bowl :( Not happy Jan!

I like to call this artwork "Ten Cranes"

A variation on the Berlin stop/go lights - a girl!

Excavations outside Kreuzkirche

Kreuzkirche, showing the blackening from the firebombing during the war

Frauenkirche. This church was almost completely demolished during the war, then rebuilt mostly from original stone and reopened in 2005 (Google Earth shows the whole thing surrounded in a construction building). We might have gone inside but there was some youth festival on and too many people making too much noise.

Statue of Martin Luther outside Frauenkirche

A piece of the original dome of the Frauenkirche

The blackened part is one of the two larger sections of the church that
remained after the bombing. They rebuilt the church around it.

Academy of Fine Arts

Dome of the Academy of Fine Arts

All we need now is Donatello to complete the set..

Augustusbrücke, on the site of the oldest bridge in Dresden

Stallhof and Hofkirche

This toilet was not worth 25c!!

Semperoper (Opera House)

Fountain and Zwinger Gardens

Courtyard of Zwinger Palace

Zwinger Palace

Staatsschauspiel theatre

So continued wandering back to the hotel, checked out, and headed up to the station. Got our ticket in advance for Prague to Vienna so don't have to worry about that here. Now as I mentioned yesterday we were meant to have two middles on a table set of seats, but when we got on the people there had taken the two forward-facing seats, so I was all "sweet, I get a window" - backwards :) It's almost tradition now to be going backwards heh. We were even on the right side of the train to get a good view of the Elbe River as we travelled alongside it.

Training down (up) the Elbe River

Part of the Bastei Bridge in the Bastei rocks near Oberrathen

Crossed the Czech border at some unknown point, stopping a bit inside the border for a staff change. But we never did get asked for our passports - how boring!! Was hoping to get another stamp in my passport heh.

Every time a small river joins a larger one, you get a cute little village.
In this case HÅ™ensko, on the confluence of Kamenice and Labe (Elbe) rivers

Something broke half way through the trip on the Czech side of the border and we just sat there. For an hour :( The train got very hot and stuffy too :( But we got moving eventually and arrived in Prague an hour late. But we didn't arrive in the station we thought we were going to arrive in, so had to figure out where we were and how to get to our hotel. Took us a while to figure it out, but made it in the end.

Bridges in ÃšstÃ nad Labem, Czech Republic

Hrad StÅ™ekov just south of ÃšstÃ nad Labem

Locks near Lovosice

Dancing House, nickname given to the Nationale-
Nederlanden building in Prague

The hotel is quite nice, free wireless and included breakfast, and our first bed with a single mattress - a king sized one at that! We can be newlyweds properly now ;)