Not all beer & skittles

I know I’m unlikely to be believed when I say it’s not a junket or a jolly attending a trade event like the International Dental Show; even if it does take place in foreign parts. It’s actually even worse when the show is held in a location known for good beer and some equally fine places in which to drink it, because instead of wandering around and visiting these establishments, you’re stuck inside a vast, windowless exhibition hall.

However, before I list some of the pitfalls of a week away on company business, it was actually good being out of the UK last week and away from the all-consuming madness which is Brexit. It’s rather galling though to be in a country like Germany, which is obviously doing rather well; and to think this was Britain before Cameron pulled his crazy referendum stunt. So, unless you’re the most rabid of Brexiteers, it’s rather sickening to look back at where we were as a country in 2015, and think, “This could and should have been us!”

That’s enough of politics; now let’s get back to the trade shows. I was in Cologne on company business so was obviously there to work, and it’s worth bearing in mind that it cost the company a lot of money to rent exhibition space and send my colleagues and I to Germany for the week.

The company have been exhibiting at IDS since the 1990’s, and the one member of our team who has attended every one of the shows says the event gets bigger and better every time. This was my fifth attendance at IDS;  my first show being in 2007. I missed out on 2013 and 2015, primarily to give other in the company the chance to take part. We have stayed at the same hotel since 2009; a small family-run business which is just five minutes walk away from the main station, and slightly under 30 minutes walk away from  Kӧln Messe – the vast complex of exhibition halls on the eastern bank of the River Rhine.

It is worth mentioning that on my first visit to IDS I stayed on one of the river cruisers which normally ply up and down the Rhine. During what is a slack period for river cruising, these comfortable and well-equipped vessels are pressed into service to provide additional accommodation for the tens of thousands of visitors who flock to Cologne every two years for the dental show.

I hadn’t been with the company very long, and my attendance at IDS was something of an afterthought., but I was more than pleased with my well-appointed and centrally located accommodation. My cabin was on the lower deck, which was partly below the water-line. It was a strange experience looking out from my berth to see the waters of the Rhine just below the level of the window, and quite scary to experience the wash created every time one of the massive cargo barges, which sail up and down the river, passed by.

I said at the beginning that it’s no picnic attending one of these events, and whilst there are obvious compensations  in so much that one’s board, lodging and travel expenses are covered by the company, the days are long and quickly merge into equally long evenings, with next to no time for one’s self.

As an example, the show’s opening hours are 9am – 6pm, Tuesday to Saturday, and it is essential that there is at least one person manning the stand during those hours. It is around 30 minutes on foot from the hotel to  Kӧln Messe, and whilst on a fine day the walk across the River Rhine, via the Hohenzollern Bridge (Cologne’s equivalent of London’s Hungerford Bridge), can act as an exhilarating pre-show wake-up, in bad weather it can be pretty bleak and rather exposed up there, and not the best of places to be.

Leaving the exhibition at 6pm prompt, means arriving back at the hotel 30 minutes later. Although we had two free evenings which were quite leisurely, the remainder were a bit of a whirl, especially on the Thursday when we were guests of the European arm of our Japanese parent company, and with a 7pm start to the function, it really was a manic rush to get smartened up, and back across the river to the Regency Hyatt Hotel where the dinner was taking place.

Our Japanese directors pulled a similar stunt the following evening; again within a 7pm start, although that particular dinner was a much more casual affair and took place on the same side of the Rhine as our hotel.

All this rushing left virtually no time for serious beer exploration, although you will have gathered from a couple of my previous posts that we did manage to visit a couple of Cologne’s classic beer halls. As for site-seeing, I have done most of that on previous more leisurely trips, and having ascended one of the spires of Cologne’s magnificent cathedral on my first visit to the city, I have no intention of repeating the climb some 45 years on!

So there we have it, and whilst it was undoubtedly a tiring and at times quite boring week, it was still not an opportunity or experience to miss. Whether the 2019 event is my last, remains to be seen, but overall the shared camaraderie which develops between colleagues whilst away from home made it an entertaining and above all enjoyable visit to Cologne.