Costly repairs

     I crammed a lot of museum trips into the start of the week so I'd be able to visit a nearby national park today. This park is so close that you can take the tram to it, and it's filled with stunning rock formations. Alas, we had what the Germans call "Scheißwetter" today. I was  willing to brave some cold weather for good scenery, but when they predicted sleet it sounded a while lot less fun.
     Instead, I walked around the city, ate even more torte, and went to a movie. That's the first time I've been inside a movie theater in the past two years; it's just not something I think to do very often. But the movie, based on an Asterix and Obelix comic, is not one that I'm likely to see in America, and I was pretty delighted to have something warm to do that wasn't a museum.
     Waking around Dresden, I'm continually awed by how much money must have been poured into this city. The Old City was mostly destroyed in 1945, and although a few mammoth Soviet-style bunker-like buildings went up, a lot of the rubble just stayed put. After Reunification, the city, like much of the former East, was a huge construction zone. They rebuilt castles, churches, and other public buildings using the original materials in the original style. The baroque Frauenkirche cost close to €200 million alone.If I stop to think about it, most city skyscapes represent billions of dollars. Its just that, in Dresden, all that money was spent in two decades.