Dresden: I went to work at the Dresden Porcelain Factory in 1999 and 2007. The first time I went almost no one spoke English, just German and Russian. I asked my friend Olaf where I could get a coffee to go – he looked at me, confused. I said you know, coffee in a cup that you can take away. He looked at me in horror “ you can not walk and drink coffee at the same time”. Blissful.
The factory was far enough away from the city that it survived the firebombing and all the molds from the 1800’s were still intact. I would look through the catalogs and point to the ones I wanted to work with. They would bring them up later on big wooden carts. They just shook their heads when they saw me cutting and reassembling the casts – just another crazy American thing.
