Here comes a candle to light you to bed

Well, the wanderlust was calling again last week, so I dashed off Thursday after school and spent two nights in Dresden. It's a nice city, not very big - I feel like I covered most of it by foot while I was there (the city center, anyway). After the Allied firebombings of February 1945 destroyed about 75% of the city center, the Dresdeners decided to reconstruct it as it had originally looked. So there are all these really old-looking buildings that were actually only rebuilt within the last fifty years. It's a little odd.

Anyway, I did a lot of walking, and also spent a few hours in the art museum, which had a lot of really cool Italian and Dutch paintings, including Raphael's Sistine Madonna, and Parmigiano's really creepy Mannerist Madonna and Child (does anyone else who took Prof. Tegmeyer's class in Rome remember this painting, the really weirdly erotic one? anyone?) I also spent a lot of time in the huge Christmas market they set up in the town square, where I bought some stollen and cookies to bring to my roommates. Do people know what lebkuchen is? I didn't, before I came here. It's basically a big gingerbread cookie coated in chocolate, and sometimes there's a jelly filling in the middle. It's sort of the national German Christmas cookie. People have been taking turns bringing a plate of it to the teacher's lounge at school.

Probably the most interesting thing about the trip, though, was the train ride there. I saw in a compartment with two elderly women, one of whom basically told us her life story - how she'd worked at a chemical factory and had to keep a gas mask next to her place, how her aunt and uncle had immigrated to the U.S. before WWII and then come to visit again in the late forties and brought bananas, which she'd never seen before. Interesting stuff. She mentioned that she was a widow, so I think she was sort of lonely, but she also just seemed like a naturally chatty person.

The hostel I stayed in was nice, and it had a book exchange - something I appreciated on Friday night, when the person with the bed next to mine was snoring and I couldn't sleep. Someone had left a copy of George Orwell's 1984 in the lounge, so I spent a few hours reading that. I remember reading it in my junior year of high school - that was February 2001, so the people in my class were probably some of the last to read it when it wasn't so terribly relevant to current events. Anyway, rereading it this weekend made me remember that my English class had an assistant teacher that spring. He'd been sitting in on our regular classes for a while, and our teacher turned over the reins to him for some of the 1984 lessons. His name was Mr. O'Brien (if you've read the book, you know why that's funny). He wasn't particularly successful at getting us to appreciate the book, which was not entirely, or even mostly, his fault. Our English teacher that year was really terrific, one of the teachers I remember best from high school, and we just would have rather had him back. We had nothing against this college student who looked kind of uncomfortable in a suit and who was obviously still trying to find his footing in the teaching role; we just wished he would go practice on someone else.

I don't even remember what Mr. O'Brien looked like, or what his first name was, but I find myself thinking a lot about him these days, and wishing I'd put in a little more effort when he was teaching. I certainly hope he's happily teaching or in the profession of his choice (totalitarian mastermind excepted, naturally . . . ).