Had breakfast in the funny little tea room of our hotel again this morning, then packed and headed out. Roy picked a hotel that was mercifully close to the train station, so we only had to walk for a block or so. I ran into a pharmacy there to check into heavier drugs for my cold. After we determined she spoke english I went right to it: “I need ibuprofen and something with pseuephedrine in it to dry my head out”… done and done. I also got some fisherman’s friend cough drops. Yay.

Then it was on the train to Dresden - about a 4 hour journey. Once again I am floored by the trains in Europe. Electric all the way across the country, and such a smooth ride. You don’t have to worry about bottoming out in the seats and cracking your tailbone going across a “pothole” like you do on Caltrain.

Sadly the full kitchen was not available in the diner car, but there was the ever present beer and Spargle - Asparagus. Roy chose a stew thing that looked disgusting but tasted pretty good.

I spent an hour or so continuing my quest to fix the blog entries, but gave up after my lunchtime beer. Since I am sick, and my roommate Monica’s single piece of advice to me was “Eat when you are hungry and sleep when you are tired”, I slept the rest of the way to Dresden.

It was wet when we got in, and definitely couldn’t decide if it was going to storm or clear up or do something in between… and it was *cold* which made me very happy, since I have been sweating through my clothes everywhere we go.

Because it was raining and we wanted to hurry to the hotel and opera, we took a cab from the train station. The hotel ended up being a very large studio - a free upgrade - which was nice.

Sadly, no time to enjoy. I threw a sweater and jacket on to head to the opera - we took a cab again. Look at that sky behind the opera house.

The opera was Dead Man Walking - in English. Finally an opera I could understand, and the German’s would be the ones paying attention to the subtitles. Utterly different from anything I have seen so far, this show was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera and was a wild success there. In Dresden it also had a very warm welcome. This was not the opening. Only at openings do the directors and designers come out for what is clearly a traditional booing.

The story line is approximately the same as the movie. Guy is on death row and loses all of his appeals. Throughout, Sister Helen tries to get him to own his crime. Eventually he does, then they needle-time. It’s a modern story line, though we wondered if it was a difficult translation for German’s who don’t have the death penalty. The show started with a 5 minute movie clip played on a scrim that shows the original crime, scored alternately by the opera and a soundtrack. Then the present day characters reveal themselves behind the scrim. Finally you get to the main set - a very complicated mechanical set that was sort of like a rubik’s cube that only rotated on one axis. Each side had three doors, and depending on the needs one or more of the doors on the face would open to revel stuff. Roy warned me before I came out that the show might not happen as they burned out a couple of motors trying to get it to work.

Roy’s connection here were three of the leads. Sister Helen was in his Madrid show (previous to Lyon), and he had also worked with De Rocher and his Mother at various times. We went out after the show with these folks. They were a very close crowd, and very warm. We ended up at a horrible place called The American Bar which had a 40 page drinks menu - including table of contents and glossary. I had a beer and ignored the bar and had a good time, though my cold was not going to give me much of a break again. THough we didn’t really want to leave, the place was outrageously smoky and we had to go. The cold air was delicious, but messed up my throat.

The Dresden opera, inside and out

We got back to the hotel exhausted. We tried to get internet access, but it turned out to be mostly impossible. Roy was online long enough to book our Berlin hotel, then we hit the sack. I apparently snored very badly last night thanks to the cold. Thankfully he had some earplugs. I slept like a log.