Every morning when I enter my still new kitchen I admire the way this German butter dish looks on my counter. It is glass and stainless steel, very sleek and European to my eye, maybe because I bought it in Europe. Saint Mike and I are not very well travelled but we have been a few places, including Dresden, Germany. It was his last trip for Intel, to a super-computing conference there, and he asked me to go along. He had to spend all three days in the convention center talking to people, while I walked around and went to museums and cafes and shops. It was sort of lonely, because I wanted to share my impressions with someone, but quite intense. I found Dresden to be both charming and disturbing. As I'm sure everyone remembers, Allied firebombing at the end of WWII reduced it to rubble, and then it was part of East Germany until the wall fell and Germany was re-united. Before the bombing it was a very culturally rich city; a showcase of Baroque architecture, and the home of the Meissen porcelain works, the first European manufacturer to crack the Chinese formula for porcelain. Now all of its most important Baroque buildings have been restored, so the old city center looks (so I read) like it used to do, but with strange anomalies.
Turning even one block away from the restored center, I encountered smart, cool shops like the one that sold my butter dish, or crumbled ruins of houses with trees growing out of them, or squat, dull buildings with murals of glorious workers painted on the sides. Recent history collides and co-exists with older memories on every street in Dresden. 
The place is packed with tourists. Buses roll in every morning filled with people, and they are all German. I encountered remarkably few foreigners on my walks. I only heard other languages when I was in the hotel among the super-computing people. There is a performance every night at the opera house, and all the restored churches take turns giving organ recitals in the morning. The
used-to-be palaces are museums now, showing amazing art, porcelain, clocks and scientific instruments, armor, and the treasury of Auguste the Strong, Elector of Saxony, which has recently been returned by the Soviet Union (they "borrowed" it after the war). In every museum gift shop there are books or pictures of the collection, of course, but also of the complete devastation that the museum has recovered from. One doesn't have to be looking for them to see black and white photos of smoking human remains.
Across the Elbe River the bombing wasn't so severe, so most of those buildings are original, and occupied by regular Dresdeners. The "New Town" (it was new in the eighteenth century) is shabby, with the air of incipient gentrification. Beautiful, expensive shops sit next to deserted, crumbling Communist era apartments covered with graffiti. There are lots of less exalted shops as well, some with a hippie-ish, artistic on a shoe-string kind of ambiance. Once I looked through an arched doorway in a beautiful, traditional old building and glimpsed another world. The whole center of the block was hollow, with paths and little shops and whimsical wall decorations open to the sky.
It was a delightful, slightly surreal encounter. I found a store sellling hand-made textiles and was dyeing to ask about them, but the proprietor only spoke German, so we didn't get too far. I was reminded that in three days I wasn't even scratching the surface of Dresden.
Another shopping experience was surprisingly nostalgic. I went into a very nice department store with six or seven stories that reminded me strongly of the old Frederick and Nelson store in downtown Seattle. The impression was cemented when I found a fabric and notions department carrying fine textiles for dressmaking. I can't remember when the department stores closed their fabric sections, but I remember going to Frederick's and fingering the soft woolens and silks, much nicer than anything our hometown Penney's had.
I could go on at length, and would love to talk more about Dresden with someone who has been there. In the meantime, I have my butter dish and the memories I was very lucky to have been able to form.