Touring Europe: Dresden.

For a few short hours in between Berlin and Prague, we stopped to have lunch in Dresden. This colorful German town was sadly destroyed by air raids at the tail-end of WWII but later restored to its original beauty, complete with Old-Town architecture and all. Kristen and I shared two fresh salads and a bottle of sparkling aqua outside one of the precious bakeries, where the opportunities to people-watch were aplenty. Shopping vacationers, costumed tour guides, and lines of elementary school children all eagerly making their way around the main square reminded me of younger days spent in busy amusement parks, a wide-eyed-and-out-of-breath kind of excitement alive on each little face.

It felt good to take a break from our cramped charter bus for a bit, but I wish we would have had more time to meander through the streets of Dresden. We hadn't even scraped the surface before it was time to hop back on again, en route to the Czech Republic.