So I had a message (a really lengthy one, too) to
Ruth lined up in this spot but lost it, so that'll
have to be reconstructed sometime. Ah, well, no
system is perfect. Here's a continuation of my
last year's blast from the past.

==

The Westin breakfast was uninteresting but again
abundant, with enough American selections for Lilli.
For me, Teewurst, a factory product that was fine
ground mystery meat - think Vienna sausage but made
with 50% pork fat; a rather nice homemade liverwurst
with pulled pork in it, and a four-section mosaic
sausage - some baloneylike substance, blood sausage,
head cheese, and liver sausage. Also a rather odd,
tough smoked salmon that made me think of a
(then-)recent echo discussion of dyed fish.

Black coffee for her, various citrus juices for me.

Wandering about town a bit was fun, and then we
took the tram back to the hotel to pack up our
traps and transfer to the more centrally located
Hilton Dresden an der Frauenkirche, where for 25
more Euro than Lilli had paid, we got a small but
prime corner room overlooking a bunch of nice-smelling
restaurants, none of which we ended up patronizing.
Breakfasts here were even less memorable - very like
American ones, with sausages that might as well have
been Jimmy Dean and eggs and hash browns from the
German equivalent of Sysco. But good location.

Gemaeldegalerie is a real treasure trove, not the
days and days' worth of the museum by the same name
in Berlin, but a lot of spectacular stuff, Dutch and
Flemish masters, which I'm interested in, Renaissance
and Baroque Italian plunder, not so much, and the pride
of Germany, which, other than Durer, leave me cold. We
spent three hours here, though, after which Lilli
needed a break, so off to Hans im Gluck (recommended
by a helpful staffer sympathetic to the needs of a
homesick American tourist), where she got a klassik
Burger, which was pretty klassik but maybe overdone by
50% or so, and I had fried white asparagus and sour
cream, a pleasant surprise for a chain burger joint. I
also got about 3 oz of her burger, so don't cry for me,
except for the mayonnaise part.

--

The Albertinum is a secretish museum a block from the
river, housing the city's collection of Romantic and
Impressionist art, including major works of Monet and
Van Gogh; also Klee, Beckmann, and numerous other
Germans too numerous to pay attention to. We tried to
get in, and some old guy seemed to shoo us away toward
the side of the building. He was grumpy and
uncommunicative in the way the old easterners have
been described. It turned out (we discovered after
wandering all the way around the premises and finding
no other entrance, only an emergency exit, that he
meant that we should enter that door and then go off
to the side to buy tickets.

The paintings were worth the trouble, and the sculpture
collection likewise. While we were viewing the marbles,
another couple, probably misled in the same way, tried to
come in the emergency exit, which caused a bit of a to-do
with guards rushing around and stuff like that. There but
for the grace of God and all that.
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