This week, we decided to take advantage of the good weather and the fact that my courses haven’t started yet and try to get out for some adventures.

If you just want the highlights of this week, here they are:

We started exploring some musical sites. From the Handel House and a Beatles Museum in Halle to the Bach Museum and Thomaskirche in Leipzig, we have had a fun time starting to track down some of these composers that we came for. We also attended a free organ concert and an amazing piano concert in the Gohliser Schlösschen.

We were finally able to get our hands on the Deutschland Ticket, a magical pass that gets us all over the country for 49 euros each for the whole month. So we put it to good use and explored some different parts of Leipzig, the neighboring city of Halle, and we took a day trip to Dresden.

We had a few other experiences. We went to church, we visited the Stasi Museum, we wandered around Leipzig, and we ate some tasty food.

That’s this week in a nutshell. It turned out to be busier that we thought, but it was pretty good!

If you want the details, read on…

It was a struggle to get our transport passes. It’s a pass designed for residents, not necessarily visitors, so it took a while before we found out how to get them with a credit card. Once we did, we were on the train the very next day to the next city over, Halle.

Halle is where Georg Friedrich Handel was born, so we went to the Handel House Museum. It was well done and we learned some new things about him. They also have a section of historic instruments that was interesting.

In doing some poking around the night before we left, Nathan found out that there’s a Beatles Museum in Halle, so we decided to try it out. It was surprisingly extensive, with details that most people wouldn’t really care about. There were a lot of wacky collectors’ items and merchandise that was entertaining to see. We ate Turkish for lunch, which was good, and our train home was delayed by an hour, which wasn’t good.

We are here in Leipzig in what happens to be the year of celebration to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Bach’s appointment to Kapellmeister of the Thomaskirche. We went to the Bach Museum and walked through the Thomaskirche. The museum is very well done with tons of information about Bach and his family. They have an awesome app that you can download and do a virtual tour. This is the city where Bach did most of his composing for choirs, composing a cantata every week for a time.

Near one of the beautiful parks, there is an 18th century palace called the Gohliser Schlösschen. We wandered around last week and this week we went to an amazing piano performance by Yeram Park. She played works by Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Schubert, Allan, and Stravinsky. It was an amazing concert and we got in for only 20 Euros each. We also caught a free lunchtime organ concert at one of the churches nearby our apartment.

Dresden is the biggest city nearby and we knew we wanted to visit. Along with Leipzig (and other cities in Germany), it was largely destroyed during World War II and then neglected during 40 years of communist rule. The rebuilding that has taken place in the city since 1990 is truly astounding and is still continuing. The baroque palace, the churches, and the buildings that house the museums are F-A-N-C-Y.

I will take just a moment here to warn you about our present travel style. We don’t visit every museum, every castle, every cathedral, or every historic site that we meet. There are just too many and we have seen most of the biggies. There is a point that you reach when you just can’t take another collection of armor or another solid gold whatever. So, I’m warning you now that we won’t be taking the “Grand Tour” of Europe that others might pursue. Now, back to Dresden.

With that in mind, we did choose to do a walking tour of the Old Town (Altstadt) and the New Town (Neustadt). It was very interesting and informative. (If you are visiting Europe on your own, I highly recommend Rick Steves’ books and excellent phone app.) We also chose to visit the Frauenkirche, the church that burned in 1945 and collapsed in a heap and was untouched until German reunification after 1989. It’s been rebuilt with some of the original stones in their original positions. In one of the photos, you can see a placard on a piece of the rubble that resides in the square outside the church, indicating where it came from the dome. The church is such a powerful message of recovery and rebuilding. There is also a cross on the altar with a wonderful message. It is made from two nails taken from the cathedral in Coventry England, which was firebombed by the Germans. The cross was a gift from the people of England as a symbol of peace. Simply beautiful.

Here in Leipzig, we visited the museum that has been built in the former headquarters of the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi. It’s in a distinctive building called the “Ronde Ecke”, or round corner. We learned more about the extensive surveillance that the East German citizens suffered at the hands of the Stasi and a huge network of their neighbor informers. It was astounding. We also learned how the “Peaceful Revolution” that resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the toppling of the regime actually started 7 years prior in Leipzig’s Nickolaikirche with weekly prayer meetings. The citizens continued their vigils and they grew over the following years until in 1989, there were completely peaceful demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people. Moving.

We also went to church and that was another adventure. Everything was in German, except for the opening and closing prayers, which were offered by English-speakers. We sang the hymns in German (our experience with singing Swiss songs came in handy!), we took the sacrament, and we enjoyed being with people while we tried to pick out words that we know (Nathan understands far more than I do). The young women presented the program and that was nice. Coincidentally, they sang the same song that Nathan played with Lauren and Sarah a few weeks ago. We talked to a few people after the meeting, so that was good and we will visit again.

That’s about it for this week. I start back into school work tomorrow, but I’m hoping that I can confine my study to Monday-Thursday so that we can have some adventures on the weekends. We have some things to figure out this week so that we can take steps toward registering our address and getting me a longer-term visa. More to come.

I would love to hear from you! Do you have any questions about what’s going on with us or questions about Germany? Leave a comment with all the things you are wondering about!