Ooh blimey! Once again, I fail to update my blog very quickly. Well, it's a sign I'm enjoying myself at least. So, where were we?

Ah yes, Dresden. It was a hard start: the Wednesday night saw me drinking too much beer in the beergarden, surrounded by friends who came to celebrate my birthday with me. So I didn't feel too fresh when I had to get up early on the Thursday and pack for a long weekend away. At least Bénédicte was kind enough to come and pick me up from home in her car. We drove together to the EPO's main offices and there joined a merry band of international types on two coaches, bound for Dresden.

The journey took much longer than expected, partly because we had to wait for ages for a replacement bus (the other bus - thankfully not the one I was in - had a fault with the door locks, such that it kept beeping even though it was shut, which understandably wore down the nerves of the passengers). Lunch was dire - the longest I've EVER had to queue for fast food - but we finally arrived in our luxury hotel in Radebeul, just outside Dresden, in blazing sunshine.

We were met by preparations for a monster welcome barbecue evening. Rarely have I seen so much food in one place. And it was accompanied by limitless drinks from the bar. It's fair to say that Béné, Franck, Marie-Laure, Pierre-Jean & I (I was an honorary Frenchman for the weekend) drank our own bodyweight in red wine that evening - and our tongues were dyed a pleasant shade of deep blue for the following 24 hours to prove it!

The hotel had a lovely wellness area, which Béné and I tried to use each day. The pool was reasonably long and reasonably empty, the sauna hot enough and the quiet room quiet. All good!

We went on lots of excursions over the next few days, including a city centre walking tour (for which the rain held off; it started to piss down just as we broke for lunch) and a "catamaran cruise" along the Elbe (which turned out to be a dodgy inflatable raft with rickety chairs, but what the hell). The leitmotiv of the weekend was, however, food.

Oh, My, Gohhhhhd!! And I thought I was bad!! Clearly the organisers of the EPO get-to-know-people-from-the-other-sites event had decided that the only way to get to know people is over truckloads of delicous food & drink. No that I'm arguing with that theory, oh no! But the sheer scale of the buffets was overwhelming! Even the picnic lunch in the vineyard that we had as part of our "cruise" was obscenely well-stocked. And so much wine everywhere! If I hadn't felt so uncomfortably full all the time, I would have said I was in heaven.

I suppose I should say a few words about Dresden, the visiting of which was my primary motivation in going on this trip with Béné; believe it or not, I didn't know about the whole food angle until I got there!

Dresden was built pretty much all at once a few hundred years ago, then it was pretty much destroyed all at once in 1945, and now it's been restored pretty much all at once. The pearl of Dresden was - and now is again - the Church of Our Lady. This too was destroyed in the firestorm of '45 that followed the Allied carpet bombing, and the Communists decided to leave its ruins (basically one bit of wall, one arch & a pile of rubble) untouched, as a warning against Capitalism. Now it's been rebuilt, using as many original stones from the rubble pile as possible.

These old stones (and the surviving arch) are easy to spot because they are black, whilst all the new stone (the vast majority of the church) is white. We were informed by our guide that Dresden's local limestone naturally turns black because of its high iron content, so it's not a question of industrial-era pollution as in so many other cities. All around the city you can see shiny white details on walls, or statues, or bits & pieces, in otherwise black buildings.

It feels ever so slightly Disney to walk around all these brand new chocolate-box pastel buildings. I think in ten years' time, when the new stuff is a bit weathered, it will all look much more authentic.

One cool building is an old cigarette factory just on the edge of the old town, on the river. It's shaped like a mosque, complete with a huge glass dome and two slender minarets. These were a ruse to get around the ban on chimneys in town at the time of construction (in the 1920s). The factory has closed down, but it's been turned into an arts venue. And on the roof there's a beer garden with spectacular views across the Old Town. We had dinner there one evening (just the French gang plus myself and Astrid as honorary frogs).

After dinner at the factory, we headed over the river to the New Town - which, of course, is not that new at all. It was spared the worst of the wartime destruction and so has a completely different flair. There are lots of grungy bars and student hangouts. We were up for a bit of a boogie, and just followed our ears to what we thought was a happening bar - but it turned out that the music was coming from the car parked outside the entrance!! We nearly stopped to dance around the car, but then decided that would be a little too silly, even for us.

As was bound to happen, the weather on our day of departure was spectacularly hot. Béné and I headed for the farewell brunch buffet and ate our fill, then walked into the centre of Dresden to get a few photos of the beautifully restored Baroque old town buildings in sunshine rather than rain. Then we caught the tram back to the brunch, ate some more, and finally hauled ourselves into our coach. The journey back to Munich was even longer than the journey up. It was cruel to see such lovely hot sunny weather through glass. But you can't have it all...