The long return, Wed, 01 Jul 2020 | written by Simon
Jemma and Simon at a City in Europe, Germany

From Köningstein we drove off to Meissen, to see the famous porcellain manufactury. It was all we were hoping and fearing: super interesting workshops about the porcelain making history and technique, and some horrible porcellain. Why, oh why did porcellain get so associated with the horrible Baroque and Rococo styles, why are all those figurines so incredibly kitch and ugly? We felt bad for pretty much only liking the Eastern-looking designs and some more modernist and Art Nouveau pieces. But then we saw some figurines of ‘dancing dwarves’ and ‘Chinese men and women’, and the sheer horribleness of them cured us. It seems that porcellain (and especially the figurines as opposed to dishes) is just the pinnacle of show-off art for priviledged yet taste-deprived Western snobs.

After the factory we hit the town, yet arrived too late – the Cathedral was already closed, as were all the other places we thought of visiting. We admired them from the outside and, somewhat tired, stopped for a drink at the lovely town square. Those German towns are just all so lovely, so quaint and clean and pictoresque…