Are you ready for this? Part 1: Saturday

was epic because Erin, Karlien and I were amazing and finished 1/3 to a half of our portfolios in addition to going to the post office and Rewe with Meghan. It was again, a horribly hot day and it was nice to go errand-running in the air conditioning. But kind of brutal to go back outside. We spent the whole time waiting for the tram talking about baseball and ice cream.

Then, after we had epically gotten lots of work done in a fun, roommate-bonding manner, we went to NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM!

Here is reason #298130293217598301283 why Europe is brilliant:

Every year there's a discounted night where the museums are open late and you can go to the many many museums in this single city for under 10 euro and there's even special transportation set up to get you in between them in the most efficient manner possible!

We, however, were not very efficient and we ended up going to 3, fabulous, museums. :-D Efficiency is overrated.

We all got dressed up in our skirts and went first to the Albertinium (7:30ish) where we saw

DEGAS' LITTLE DANCER! (First thing we saw and Erin's favorite for the whole night)

and other fun things like a large square of compressed garage, a yellow mattress next to a purple mattress on the wall, two giants, a bunch of things in storage, a couple of pieces of wall from Assyria, and several things in the color scheme of Karlien's skirt. It. Was. Fabulous. I love art! I love wandering around till you're 100% saturated with it but can't wait to see what's around the corner! Karlien came along instead of going to the last Germany game with Meghan and we were glad because we got to tell her all about Impressionism and stuff (because, oh yeah, we saw a bunch of impressionist and modern stuff too!) (In case you didn't catch the modernness implied in the garage, mattresses and the giants).

(9:00ish) Next, we wandered slowly toward our next bus stop to head to the Museum of Natural History. But it was sunset and it was Dresden and it was beautiful and it took us an hour to get from Synagoge to Prager Strasse! :-D (Like, 2 metro stops...should take 20ish mins walking.)

We ate delicious, delicious ice cream.

(10:00ish)We stopped off at the botanical gardens, which were kind of freaky at night! But totally still awesome!

Then we got back on the bus (same one Meghan was on thanks to our awesome coordination thanks to me getting minutes on the phone Nicole left me) and went quite some way on the bus. A little old lady heard our tone of "Huh?" when we were discussing where to get off and she tried to help us and some other nice people did too but they didn't speak much English and so we ended up getting off in the middle of nowhere. (11:00ish).

However, it was actually at Pillnitz, where there's a castle--only it was a little ways away from the bus stop. We finally figured out, with the help of a local who had never heard of it before, and the bus driver, that the Natural History Museum was IN the castle. By this time we weren't quite sure what to expect, but, we were partway there so we figured we might as well keep going! We were quite lucky that Meghan had joined up with us at that point because she had been there before on the German program two years ago. We all walked for 10 or 15 mins through the dark and scary trees with a lone voyager named Maria who's studying in Dresden but is from Berlin. We finally made it to the castle (giant U shaped courtyard) and went in to the first unlocked doors we saw and asked the person standing there where the museum was. He gestured to the stuffed crocodile in the middle of the entrance/ballroom/type room and said we were here!

So, it was a pretty fabulous tiny little stuffed animal collection--Flamingos, horribly realistic looking snakes and tiger, a couple monkeys, some birds, more woodlandy creatures that you'd expect. I enjoyed it. The funny thing was, it was indeed just in the castle and it was a later castle so you're in this like, baroque-ish wooden floored castly place pretending to be a scientific natural history museum. Good times. :-D

Then while we were there we wandered through some more of the castle and saw the kitchens, which were cool, and a small room of "New Things." Like a thermos. And some other modern miracles! At one point we all claimed which room we were going to live in--Karlien claimed the orange one and I got pink, of course.

By this time it was 12:15/12:30 and Karlien was getting delirious from tiredness (and the rest of us were getting kind of goofy too) and since things closed at 1, we didn't want to miss the bus. So we made it back by 2: hot, sticky, exhausted, and culture saturated with some good memories under our belt. Like the guy shooting off fireworks on the sidewalk because Germany won. Like Karlien and Erin trying to scare Katie at the botanical gardens. Like all the awesome art! :-D

So that, dear readers, was Saturday.