Dresden Kirchentage

Thursday was a national holiday in Germany, called Christihimmelfahrt - otherwise known as "Christ's Ascension."  As a part of this celebration, the city of Dresden always has a period of 5 days called Kirchentage ("church days").  The Hofer Haas family had never been to this celebration in Dresden before, so we took a 1-1/2 hour drive to this former East-German city, which still has remnants of Soviet influence.

a traditional Thüringer Rostbratwurst

There were so many people packed into the city, as mostly German tourists came specifically for these "church days."  The focus of the Kirchentage was the old Lutheran church called Frauenkirche.  The church was so full that they had a big screen outside where people could sit and watch the service going on inside.  Helmut and I think that this is a good opportunity every year for the church to reach a lot of people who normally do not attend church.

Frauenkirche

Mostly we just walked around the city, and looked at the different buildings and architecture.  I found it all to be quite fascinating.  As we walked around, we noticed that a lot of people were wearing bright green scarves.  At first we thought they must all be from the same tourist group or something, but as we kept walking, we determined that there were way too many people wearing these scarves to all be from the same group.  We noticed people who had badges, and some without badges, some in couples, some walking alone - all had this same bright green scarf that said "Kirchentage, Dresden, 1.-5. Juni."

We finally found the green scarves!

The more we saw, the more we were confused.  It seemed like almost everyone had one of these scarves!  And we did not see anyplace they were being sold!  We began asking people where they got these scarves, and they all said they bought them from someone on the street the day before.  Well, if we were not confused before, we were really stumped now.  Were all these people with scarves really in Dresden the day before?  It just didn't seem logical, and we spent the majority of the day trying to figure it.  Finally, our last chance was a volunteer who told us where a stand was that sold these scarves.  I was skeptical, because we had walked through the entire city and not seen a single place selling them.  But when we got to where she told us, lo and behold, there were the scarves!  So, Sebastian and I both bought one so that we could say we were in Dresden for the Kirchentage in 2011.