Gruenhundstrasse: November 2013

"Torre" means Tower in Italian!

We're back in Italy! This time we went to Siena! There are a lot of churches in Italy! Probably anywhere you stand in Italy, you can see at least three churches, but our church was tucked away behind another building. Good thing there was a sign telling us where to go!

This is not a church. It is the Torre del Mangia, which means the "Tower of the Eater" because the first guy who was in charge of the tower spent all his money on food in the pubs and restaurants on the square.

It is the second tallest medieval tower in Italy.

We had a picnic in the square, which is called the Piazza di Campo.

My mom really wanted to go here.

People in the Piazza di Campo.

So we climbed up the stairs to the tower! This is the view looking up at all of the stairs!

This is the view from one of the windows in the stairs.

In the top of the tower, there are bells.

The Piazza di Campo from above.

In the distance you can see a stripey church. We'll go there later...

Here's the view from the top. You can see the hills of Tuscany.

My mom likes the view.

We threw a football around in the Piazza.

The bricks in the Piazza looked like this.

Saying goodbye to the Piazza, we walked toward the stripey church.

Here we are! On the steps of the stripey church.

It's actually called the Duomo di Siena di Santa Maria Assunto.

But we called it the zebra church. It is made of black and white marble, with a little bit of pink trim.

Something cool that we noticed about the church tower, was that every floor of the tower, there was one more window added. So the first floor had one window, the second floor had two, etc.

The third tower we saw was the tower in Arezzo.

Arezzo is a small city one hour from Siena.

The piazza in Arezzo was all tilted and slanty on a hill.

See the slope here?

Here is Kieran standing in the center. He thinks he's the center of the universe...

And of course, we threw the football!

Next stop....Rome!

"Tag und Nacht" means "Day and Night" in German.

This weekend we went to Freiberg and Dresden.

We drove from our hotel in Dresden to Freiberg on Saturday and went to the LDS temple.

It was kind of similar to the Frankfurt Temple.

That evening we went to the store and we saw lots of different flavors of milk. Here are the kinds we got: Chocolate, Pistachio-Coconut, and White Chocolate Macadamia Nut. Yum! (It's always fun to go to bigger cities because their grocery stores are bigger and have a greater selection of fun German groceries!)

And now for the latest edition of ...

Maya's Ultimate Guide to Kinder Eggs

Kieran is displaying a "Kinder Maxi" - very similar to a Kinder Uberraschung, the only difference being the size. The Kinder Maxi contains about 3 times more chocolate than a regular Kinder Egg. It's like the size of an ostrich egg instead of a chicken's egg.

The prize still comes in the exact same yellow tube - only larger! Careful not to swallow. Remember - Don't eat toys, people!

Back from the random Kinder Egg update, on to Dresden...

This is the Zwinger, which was a palace where King Augustus held his parties. He was the King of Saxony. Here you can see the Meissen porcelain bells on each side of the clock. They would ring a little song every fifteen minutes. I bet that got annoying...

It basically had a big courtyard in the middle and you could walk around on the balconies.

No, Kieran is not wearing a ginormous crown...

This is just one of the balcony areas.

Dresden has a ton of spires. How many can you count in this one shot?

Right outside of the Zwinger you will find the Semperoper, which is the Opera House. There was a chariot pulled by lions on top.

And a guy on a horse in front. We thought it might be Augustus, but apparently it was someone called Johann. (Pay attention, that might be on my next anniversary quiz...)

Here is the Hofkirche, which means church of the court. It was commissioned by...you guessed it...King Augustus. It was badly damaged in the bombing of World War II, but has been restored. Dresden was part of East Germany, so it was the Allied forces who bombed it.

Next to it on the left is the Residenzschloss, or the Royal Palace, where we visited the Historiche Grünes Gewölbe, which means the Historic Green Vault. It was a crazy collection of lots of different valuable stuff like gold dining ware, jewel collections, ivory, bronze and silver collections, and you know, other valuable stuff like ostrich eggs. (No, I'm not joking. And I don't mean Kinder Maxis. I really mean ostrich eggs!) Amazingly, this collection was not destroyed during the war. Not even a cracked ostrich egg!

But, a lot of Dresden got blown up during the war.

We saw a lot of pictures in the churches and museums showing what it looked like after the war, and it mostly looked like a pile of rocks and rubble.

It's hard to believe, seeing what it looks like now.

Merry Christmas a month early - we found a red and green room!

AND we were wearing red and green coats!

In fact, Dresden was just getting ready for their famous Christmas Market.

We were a few weeks too early, but we could see them setting up already.

Cute, right?

Okay, so here is a really famous church that they just finished restoring in 2005. It's called the Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady. It was completely destroyed in World War II, but they rebuilt it back to be the same as before.

This is the inside.

As you would expect, we climbed to the top of the church. But this one was different from most other churches we have climbed.

Because when they rebuilt it all, they made the area to climb up to the top a lot wider and they had glass on the sides so you could see down into the church.

I liked this a lot. I liked that because you could see how high you had gotten.

This was the final set of stairs to the top, which were really steep.

This is the view from the top.

You can see the Elbe River.

Down there with the tiny people you can see the statue of Martin Luther in front of the church. The Frauenkirche is a Lutheran Church, and Martin Luther was from Saxony. The Hofkirche we saw earlier is a Catholic Church. Catholicism and Lutheranism are the two main religions in Germany. Even in the public schools, children are required to take a religion class, and they make you choose between Catholic, Lutheran, or "Non Religious Ethics."