A Winter Visit To The Dresden Frauenkirche Christmas Market

I did a loonng bus trip to see the Dresden Christmas market last weekend. I’ve been wanting to see Dresden but knew that I didn’t have the time to take a long weekend trip solely to visit on my own. So I decided to do the longest bus trip ever to at least see Dresden one time. Now that I’m rested, I’m glad I went, but I don’t think I’ll be doing any long bus trips anytime soon! It seems I have this recurring ‘ride a bus for half of the day’ thing going (like that one time in Croatia). In total, it was about 13 hours on the bus + 90 minutes doing a sightseeing tour to get a glimpse of the city. So 14 1/2 hours on a bus in 24 hours. Never. Doing. That. Again.

On the plus side, I was able to take some good photos and walk around the different markets all day. One of my German girlfriends came along, and so I was asking her to point out all the Eastern German differences that she noticed. After the end of the day she concluded that people were more rude and spoke Russian in addition to German, so there you have it.

Below is the entrance to the Dresden Weihnachtsmarkt an der Frauenkirche. This is the one in front of the beautiful and famous Frauenkirche, also known as Church of our Lady. I also learned that Americans have a very hard time accurately pronouncing Frauenkirche. I’m not even going to attempt to explain this one, just know that you’re probably saying it incorrectly.

This market has a much bigger variety of gluhwein flavors than the regular and apfel I’ve seen before. They had holunder, cherry, plum, and many more!

Here is the traditional pyramide seen at all the markets.

I love collecting these mugs! They’re always different at every market and even differ from one stand to another.

We arrived just in time to stand in the crowd watching the parade going through. Dresden is home to Stollen, a fruit type bread with cinnamon and topped with powdered sugar. So naturally they are also home to the largest Stollen ever made, which equates to around 4 tons of bread! They drove through with this gargantuan loaf (you can see below) and behind them was a slew of cooks, presumably who assisted in creating the massive loaf of bread.

This is the famous Frauenkirche, and it really is a beautiful sight to see. We wanted a glimpse at the inside, and were able to get in relatively easily. What we didn’t realize is that we had walked into a church service, so we stayed until the organ picked back up then booked it out of there.

The above photo cracked me up. There were palm trees, presumably fake, in the winter setting with the church in the background.

Up next, the most famous and oldest market in Germany, the Striezelmarkt!