Dresden - Day Two

Tuesday 6 May

How typical, the day we plan to visit the Hygiene Museum the sun is shining and we will be indoors for a large part of the day.

The Hygiene Museum was started in the early 1900s and in the 1930s they produced the first transparent human complete with bones, muscles and arteries. The museum was developed to unlock the mysteries of the human body for the general public and like many other institutions in Germany it was high jacked by the Nazis to use for political propaganda and several of the doctors including the Director fled to the United States.

The museum deals with all aspects of the human body from conception to death, all the senses and organs, interactive displays, films, models of various organs and many preserved part of the human body are displayed. The display also covered social science, history and scientific research together with scientific instruments both old and new. The scope of the exhibition covers every imaginable part of the human body from DNA to reactions in the brain from various stimuli. As a large part of the explanations accompanying the displays were in German we probably didn’t spend as much time as many visitors but still spent nearly four hours to cover all the display.

The museum also mounts temporary exhibitions for up to six months and the current display is on happiness, luck and fortune, walking through this display and the children’s museum meant we spent over five hours at the museum.

From the museum we walked to the Old Town to the Church of the Holy Cross and just missed a fifteen minute organ recital, so we continued to the Church of our Lady to view the interior which is rather grand and colourful for a Protestant Church with the Altar and surrounds similar to some of the Baroque Churches we have visited but not as busy.

While we were sitting in the church around two hundred school children, ranging in age from around ten to fifteen, trooped in and assembled in the Choir, as the European's call it, and proceeded to rehearse for a concert in the church tonight. The quality of the singing of a very difficult classical piece and the acoustics of the church silenced every visitor. We later learned that this was a World Childrens’ Choir with children from, Australia (Adelaide), Hungary, Africa, America, China and other countries and this was the first time they had sung together, the harmonies of the various parts was amazing and although the conductor asked them to repeat some passages again I think he was quite impressed.

From the church we retraced our steps past some of the old buildings to the Augustus Bridge an, old stone bridge with around eight arches and walked over it to the New Town. Unlike the Old Town only a few of the old buildings have been restored and this side of the Elbe River and it is very modern. We spent about an hour walking around and stopped for a meal before walking the three km back to the hostel and hopefully a quiet night. After complaining to the manager about the noise last night we have been upgraded to a better room on the fifth floor and given a discount on our account.

Tomorrow we leave for Erfurt.