Dresden has been an interesting place to visit so far, although as Libby said it is unlike many of the cities we’ve seen previously in Germany. This is the first time we’ve visited an East German city, and it definitely has a different feel fromthe west. For one thing, there’s a heck of a lot more concrete. It’s still been a fun place to stay, though, and I’ve enjoyed my two weeks here. The food is probably the biggest problem I’ve faced so far, as we had more pork in our first two dinners here than I’ve had in the previous year (Oh, for the record: SchweinHaxe? Avoid it. No, really).  My coworker, John, and I made it a point to hunt out non-Saxon food after that, with varying success – we tried Indian, Spanish Tapas, Australian, Italian… and avoided the Tex-Mex place (with real cowboys) like the plague. Unfortunately we were limited to the Altstadt near our hotel for most of our meals, so the restaurants tended to be fairly touristy. We also made it a game to try and see how long we could stick with German in ordering our food. Game over was when the waitress/waiter either got impatient with our stumbling German and switched to English, or we ran out of vocabulary and were forced to change. In a good round we’d get to dessert, in a bad round the waitress would hear “Ich möchte…” and immediately say “ah, I speak English”. Our best bout came when we got a waitress who didn’t speak English at all – game on!

As for work, well, it’s been fun. The guys that work in Dresden are a nice bunch, and they’ve been good about taking us out for lunch every day and telling us about what its like to live here. Generally the morning starts for me with a jog down the Elbe (which has some pretty spectacular scenery, and it’s flat!), followed by breakfast with John at a bakery in the plaza next to our hotel. Then we checkout our bikes, ride 3 km down the river path to our office, and get a couple hours of work done before the rest of our coworkers show up at 10:00.  After that, it’s meetings for a while, a walk to a restaurant for a two hour team lunch, meetings for another hour or two (often sitting outside the coffee stand next to the office, which has the only good coffee in Dresden), then we bike back down the river to our hotel and start hunting for dinner. All in all, I could live with the German workday J.