We want to start this post by remembering Oreo – a wonderful dog and good friend to all the Bezzinas. We’ll miss her.

Tuesday morning our lovely AirBnB host treated us to an ARG/iPad location based game around Dresden. The game was still in development and was a bit like one of those Escape Room games except across multiple locations in the old town. Pretty fun concept.

We took some quiet time in the middle of the day then went for a walk back to funky Neustadt. We checked out some of the street art in the daylight, Marthese shopped for tea & coffee things while I leafed through an awesome selection of old records. We both exercised great self control and bought nothing, which was just as well because we sat around drinking cocktails in a funky bar with old furnishings for the next hour or so. Dinner was a traditional Saxon bar with great beer and delicious, well priced food. Despite being a sad day, we ended up having a lovely afternoon, spending time together in a town we’ve come to love. Marthese was not in the mood to be photographed so here’s lots of photos of me instead.

Wednesday was our three year marriage annniversary, so we casually decided to go to Prague. A 2 hour bus ride on a Flixbus (an affordable and impressive private bus company that operates across Europe) and we were in the Czech Republic! We did a group day tour that gave us a bit of a crash course of the city – mostly on foot, and partly on a short cruise. The city is amazingly preserved, with multiple eras ranging from medieval to modern all in good nick and still in use. While lovely to visit, the place was chock full of tourists. The city gets over 10 million visitors a year, which is impressive for a city of only 1.2 million inhabitants. We learnt a little more about Bohemia and got more excited to be approaching the Austrian centre of power later in the trip.

Our excellent guide was a passionate historian who was more than happy to wear his political convictions on his sleeve. These convictions included extreme disdain for the current president and concerns about young Russians who feel the WW2 liberation entitles them to a stake in the country.

A fascinating city with lots to explore, but we were also happy to return to Germany where we felt a little more comfortable and weren’t always checking behind us for pickpockets or American tourists.