Eastside of Dresden

 On the far east side of Dresden are two particular points that you ought to hit if you go and visit the city.  It's far from the city center, and I would imagine half the visitors to the city....never get out to this area.

The first is the English Gardens or referred to by the locals as the "Large Garden".  It's a piece of property measuring roughly 3,100 feet by 6,300 feet.

The original concept came up around 1676.....a landscaped piece of property with trees, open ground, small ponds and streams.

It's gone through various stages over the past 350-odd years, and hit some low points.

The park has a light-rail connection at one end which can deliver a guy from the middle of Dresden to the park in a matter of ten minutes.  It's also near a hop-on-hop-off point with the tourist bus.

If you note the one picture shown.....the grass is awful dead at present.....from a six-week long drought.

The second site?  Oddly, the German Hygiene Museum.  This started out in 1912 as the German Medical Museum.

Oddly, it wasn't a government or university-run operation in the beginning.  It was sponsored by a successful businessman from the local area....Karl August Lingner.

Naturally, Lingner and his business front produced a number of health-related products.....and I would imagine the original displays all tied into his product line and future sales activity.  The thing is.....it drew people from the very beginning because of the clever graphic displays and the ability to take a complex medical situation and explain it in simple details.

In the 1930s.....the Nazis came to control the Museum and had the display graphics shifted around to focus on their supported ideas around Eugenics.  The structure was heavily damaged in WW II, and rebuilt to some degree during the DDR-era.  Around twenty years ago, it went through another renovation episode and continues on today.

There are three basic displays.  There's the kid's science area over the human body, the adult science area which covers everything related to health and hygiene, and the special display area.  Right now, the special display area is a graphical detail episode to explain 'relationships' and how they fit into the human health situation.

The relationships display.....from my own prospective.....has a relationship to old DDR values and is amusing at certain times.

The museum and gardens are next to each other and you probably need six to eight hours to do a decent walk through them.  The museum has a coffee shop and it's a good place to guzzle down some water if you get dehydrated.