Starnberger See - Day 1

A couple of days after returning from Budapest, I was packing my bags again to head out to work retreat by the Starnberger See. I must say, despite its proximity to Munich, I had never come out here despite various plans to check it out due to it's reputed beauty and the town of Berg being the site where King Ludwig II was found dead. The reason that ultimately brought me out here was that our project was ending and due to various reasons, we had a lot of money left over in the budget that had been earmarked as *travel/conference expenses* and it was decided that we may as well go and present our annual project reports to a BMBF representative and other consortium members in a much more relaxing environment.

The morning sun on the lake.

Our hotel. According to the pictures inside, it used to be a girls' school!

The view from the terrace is much nicer than the one my school had!

The hotel basically had it's own private frontage onto the lake

And the town it was located in (Poecking) is right across the lake from where the King was found dead!

The first day of meetings was quite productive but the view of the lake from behind the projection screen was pretty distracting. Luckily we were given a *swimming break* in between the progress reports and future plans :P

In the evening, we settled down for a bbq dinner on the terrace.

Some of my colleagues waiting for the chef to tell us it was ready

Damn tree is blocking my view!

Our crazy menu. Michael and I were reading it and our jaws hit the ground when we saw the price (thankfully paid by the budget). The question was whether we could eat €70 worth of bbq. Our mutual assessment was that we would try!

Soothed by the sounds of lake water lapping at the banks and the many bottles of wine ingested by our group, we all concurred - all of our future meetings should be like this!