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Green diamond
Frauenkirche, altar close-up
The Elbe River - Dresden
Martin Luther statue - DresdenEnjoy the city day and night...
Enjoy the city day and night as it is one of those places which is creatively and well lit. As one grows older, it’s said you become more set in your ways, but I was a person that was pretty bull-headed to begin with so I hoped to mellow with the passing years. I figured that if I didn’t, I would be hard pressed for companionship. I had met a lovely girl, named Doreen, who would test my resolve on our first real excursion together. She had been more than accommodating, bringing me to the most offbeat of beer shrines on my quest for the perfect pint but on landing in her hometown, there was little in the way of beer to drive me, and I tried to let her take the reigns in showing me a good time and her life. Her family was warm and welcoming, with sumptuous meals and a big-hearted acceptance that seemed to implicitly understand how I felt about their daughter. They lived in a small village south of Dresden and the serenity in the dead cold of winter was a welcomed respite from the constant spate of touring I had done in the previous months. We did various daytrips and I forgot all the guidebooks, letting this amazing new force in my life be my light. On an excursion to Dresden one day, we arrived on a brilliant if bitterly cold day. I wanted to just utilize the perfect angle of the waning winter sun to shoot a roll of film I had just loaded, so as to have a more suitable speed film for later that night. She wanted to warm up with a coffee and then do a tour of the Opera House. We rushed over and I silently hoped that we would miss the start but as luck would have it, they were just about to depart. It was the off-season and there were only German speaking tours available but she treated me to a ticket and there was little I could do but grin and bear it as best I could. Though it was an amazing piece of reconstruction and a beautiful building, it paled in comparison to the one I had toured in Budapest just a few months before and I grew bored quickly with the patter of the German narrative. Every time we passed a window, I saw the sun shining brightly and then slowly going down, but though she sensed I was not happy, I veiled my seething discontent well. In my younger years, this charade would have led to me boiling over and picking a huge argument as soon as the tour was over. But after calmly explaining that I would have rather not done the tour and enjoyed the nice weather, and that I was just trying to go along with what she wanted to do, she explained that I should have simply told her what I really wanted. We smiled at how simple that sounded, but I knew that I had grown a bit by doing as she wanted, and not whined about it later. I had compromised. I snapped as many photos as I could but soon the sun was too low and I still had half a roll of film in the camera. I would have to take the night photos with what was loaded but I had a tripod, and I would make do. I also had a lovely sweet girl following me all over town in the freezing cold night air, never complaining. So, I smiled once again and I said, “thank you.”
