Fantastic weekend in Dreden

What a fantastic weekend we had in Dresden!! We were staying with friends we made through Rock Challenge, a dance event that the girls love taking part in at Wildern School. Here are most of us - Max is taking the picture and Heiko is somewhere, but not here!!!

The internet is such a wonderful thing, when we realised we were flying into Berlin, we googled and discovered lots of interesting facts that had passed through our heads unnoticed when we were at school!

Heiko, Kathrin, Verena and Valentin live in Moritzburg, which is just outside of Dresden.

It is a lovely place, and as soon as you enter it you can see the lovely castle. As you can see, it was getting dark when we walked round it!

Heiko is a History teacher, as well as a music teacher, so in our trip round Dresden on Saturday we our own enthusiastic tour guide. It was such an interesting visit. All the buildings in Dresden were destroyed in the war, and during the time of the Berlin wall, were left in ruins, many buildings covered in scaffolding. It wasn't until the wall came down that renovation work properly began. We visited one fantastic building that holds the crown jewels and saw photos of the ruin it was 20 years ago - it is now fully restored and resplendant once more.

There is a church in the centre of Dresden that has become to symbolise the restoration. Fire caused it to implode during the war, and it's restoration was recently completed. People were encouraged to help it's restoration by buying a brick - Heiko's father had bought one of the bricks, although we didn't spot which one it was.

I don't know if you can see, but amongst the sand coloured stones are some dark ones - these were the original stones that have been rescued and used in the exact places they came from.

We climbed to the top of the tower - the seating for the church was a bit like a version of the Albert Hall, circular and in tiers going up the building.

From the top we could see the building where the girls took part in Rock Challenge last year.

And when we got back to the bottom, there was a part of the church that had been left where it had fallen, to remind everyone of the fantastic reconstruction that had taken place.

We were especially touched in the evening to be shown Kathrin and Heiko's box of memories of life in East Germany while the Berlin Wall was in place. As Heiko says, it was a very different life, but a happy one. One point he made was that although they couldn't travel freely, no-one around them could, and so no-one felt they were missing out. In fact they enjoyed the land and space they had. We felt very honoured to be given such a real life account of the things I had read on the internet.

Heiko is such a talented musician - we had a sing song on Saturday night, which I think was cut short once he heard our singing! He told a fab story of when he went to see an Eric Clapton concert shortly after the wall came down. He had been trying to work out how Eric Clapton had achieved the sound on his guitar in Tears From Heaven, and had spent hours trying to recreate it. When he went to the concert, he took binoculars, which he used to study Eric's hands during this song! It was then he discovered the secret - the sound is achieved by three people playing guitars!

What a lovely family, and what a fabulous weekend they gave us - one we will never ever forget.