Porcelain & the Zwinger

Aside from Augustus the Strong's private collections, he also establish a palace and grounds for parades and to publicly display to his acumen, taste and scientific knowledge.

Augustus' brag palace the Zwinger

And in the Porzellansammlung:

Porcelain walls filled with Chinese, Japanese and Meissen porcelain

Meissen modellers Johann Kaedler and Johann Kirchner's animals c. late 1500s

Porcelain glockenspiel at the entry to the Porzellansammlung

Schlemmer def. to binge #1 Pfunds Molkerei

Said to be the most beautiful dairy shop in the world, one wonders who would be in competition with Pfunds Molkerei in Dresden.

Thanks to www for this bit of photo trickery. Photos verboten in the dairy.

Pfunds has been serving milk and milk products to the Dresden people since 1880. The boys and I treated ourselves to morning tea and while ordering discovered the word for bingeing or going on a spree: schlemmer.

Hugo ordered the Schlemmer Boot, Otto and I the cakes that Dresden is famous for, eine stuck eier torte & eine stuck quark torte. Both are baked cheesecake, one has a layer of custard. Yum.

Pfunds title is well deserved. The street level shop is covered with hand-painted ceramic tiles, cornice and columns, this is Dresden after all. Mostly, they feature blue patterning but many have pastoral scenes mostly including chubby children serenely doing chores with cows and goats. The whole effect I’m calling baroque hygiene.

The shot I would have taken...

Spinning the Vinyl

A blog just about our accommodation in Dresden. Wohnung Helga is our little apartment on the border of the old slaughter yards. A pretty rough place once but gentrified now. This airbnb was chosen on the strength of it having a record player and indeed it did. We could pretend it was early 1970s DDR or even the 1980s DDR. Some of our vinyl choices were Ella Fitzgerald, ELO’s Out of the Blue, the Woodstock triple album and many German ballads and ditties, the best being Knall BonBons!

Schlemmer #2 Baroque

Dresden from the spire of the rebuilt Fraunkirche 

Part of Dresden's Schloss ( I think)

Dresden hit is straps under the patronage of King Augustus I of Saxony who had a huge appetite for the finer things in life and the Baroque period that influenced his reign is well depicted in Dresden’s architecture and cultural collections. 

We booked the necessary tickets to enter into the Old Green Vault (Altes Grunes Gewolbe), the personal treasure rooms (all nine of them) of Augustus the Strong. The Schloss rooms had been restored after the allied bombing in WW2 to the Baroque period. We entered an air-lock, two by two, where dust was taken from around us and our feet were automatically wiped, quite a weird experience. Squeaky clean we entered into the most obscenely rich and indulgent collections. An amber room, ivory room, jewell room, silver room to name a few. Augustus admirably epitomizes the schlemmer approach to life.

Then there was the New Green Vault with even more rare & priceless collections. Sitting peacefully in one cabinet was a Narwhal tusk masquerading as a unicorn horn. Given the penchant to turn most natural materials such as horn, coconut shells, ivory into vessels and then adorn it with precious metals and jewels the Narwhal tusk is surprisingly unadorned,

The stars of the Neues collection was the largest and rarest green diamond, hailing from an Indian Raj and a cherry pip decorated with 185 faces. Just what an over indulged King needs. 

Following pictures from www, one was allowed nothing in the Vaults.

Diamond Room

185 faces-count 'em

And a bit more Dresden: