Tuesday October 18-Day 5

Today I got to go to a couple Dresden museums. The first was a transportation museum with old cars, trains, streetcars and things. It was really neat stuff! I love seeing the evolution of technology and am always amazed at how far technology progresses in such a short amount of time! I really believe there is no coincidence in the correlation of the restoration of the church and the sudden takeoff in discoveries and inventions of man. It is insane what progress we’ve made.

The museum also has a video that we watched. The commentary was in German of course so I wasn’t always exactly sure what they were talking about… but the old black and white footage was fun to watch. They had a lot of footage of the rebuilding of the Kirche and it was crazy! After it collapsed it was just a HUGE pile of stones as you can imagine and they had assembly lines of people picking up the stones to get them on shelves and numbered so they could be put back close to where they originally belonged. Once the reconstruction was finished there were hoards of people there to see. I was shocked at how many people where in those shots. And can’t even have been an exaggeration because it was legitimate footage from the actual event! This building clearly meant so much to these people and I’m glad they were able to get it back.

It reminded me slightly of our lovely tabernacle back home and the tragic fire that brought that down. It was sad, but now we will get a temple to replace it! I have no idea where we’ll have stake conference now, but a temple?! What a blessing!
Then I went to the Dresden History Museum which had a lot of old artifacts and stuff from older decades and centuries of Dresden and it was pretty cool. My favorite part though was the propaganda posters from the 30’s and 40’s put forth be the National Socialist Party. It’s so crazy to me that this stuff wasn’t even that long ago. A lot of the people we hear stories about are still alive! Brother Minert keeps telling us these incredible miraculous stories and then ending them by saying something like, “and now she lives happily in Logan, Utah”. It blows my mind sometimes.

After walking around, peering in shops, and eating lunch, we hopped back on the bus and headed for Freiberg! I thought it would be a much bigger town than it is. I didn’t think about the church maybe building the temple in what seems to me to be a little out of the way for most people. I guess that’s why they have a little Mormon Hostel on the temple grounds, so people can come from far away and stay a while.

We got to stay there and it was quite fun. We all bought food from the grocery store across the street and ate it downstairs in the kitchen/dining area. We had 6 girls in each room so it was a pretty big party! While we were all downstairs playing cards one of the girls came in with crazy claims of Moroni in the sky! So we all rushed out to have a look. It turns out the cloud cover was so low that the light from the temple cast a silhouette of the angel Moroni into the clouds! It was so cool. Too bad nobody’s camera could quite capture the image. It was a beautiful sight though.