Advertisement
Published: July 12th 2008
Edit Blog Post
I arrived in Kiel on the northern coast of Germany (on the coast of the Baltic sea) on June 21 in the mid afternoon. The train from Copenhagen took about five and a half hours, but went very fast due to the very good book I was reading, "Unweaving the Rainbow" by Richard Dawkins.
When I arrived in Kiel I was greeted at the train station by my friend Janine who i studied with at Penn State last year. She lives and studies in Kiel, a town of about 250,000 with a lot of students. My trip fortuitously coincided with a festival called the Kieler Woche (Kiel Week), which is a sailing festival officially, but really it's just a big piss up with hundreds of stalls and extremely overpriced food and drink and a lot of big stages and very average cover bands singing English songs in German accents (Ok they weren't all that bad). The festival attracts 3 million people each year, which means the population increases twelve-fold at this time of year. I arrived on the first Saturday of the festival. I dropped my stuff off at her apartment and we went to the Rugby oval to watch
Construction
There's a lot in Hamburg the Kiel sevens teams get severely beaten over and over again. Some of Janine's friends are somehow linked to the rugby team, so we watched the tournament with some of Janine's friends. Not many of the Kiel players are German, most of the guys were British, Irish, Aussie or Kiwi. The Scottish team was very good, and the British Navy was ok, but in the end the final was the Fijian army versus another Fijian team. Fiji won.
Janine and I cycled to the International food market to meet some of her friends. I had some Paella from the Spanish stall and then we all walked down to the coast. We couldn't get the bikes through some of the streets because they were so packed. We went onto a floating pier thing (it was sooo packed) with a DJ in a big tower above and heard lots of German and American music and drank this German rum with cola. I didn't know most of the music, but the Germans were all pretty excited by it judging by the several litres of cola that was spilt on me by the moshing Germans. The floating pier closed at midnight, and we
A pig
for no particular reason walked down the port and had a look at some other stalls before going into a bar in the main strip at Kiel.
The next day we slept in and Janine and I and her roommate Tina had a German breakfast of Brotchen (German bread) with all types of cheese and vegetables and cold meat, which was really nice. We ate off wooden chopping boards. I notice that the food in Scandinavia and Germany is much better than US and UK food - they eat a lot of brown bead which is really tasty and fills you up very quickly. They also eat a lot more fresh fruit and vegetables and eat smaller portions. Also on an unrelated matter the clothes and shoes in Scandinavia and Northern Europe are much better in my opinion (not to mention the girls...).
After breakfast we were picked up by Janine's friend Frida, and she drove us to the main port, where we saw all the ships and the sailing races. We stayed there for a little while and then went to the beach just down the coast. The day was variable, but we had a good couple of hours of sunny
Wind Turbines
There are heaps of these in Northern Germany and war weather in the afternoon. I think it was the first time I had swum in the sea for almost a year. It was really good. The water was not too cold (although apparently colder than the other coast, the North sea, which is warmer because of the Gulf stream). I noticed that the water was not very salty. We made a big impressive sandcastle and watched the enormous Scandinavian liners pass really close by on their way north. We sunbaked for a while, me trying to shake off my six months of accumulated English pastiness. I got a little sunburnt but it's much better now after a couple of days and my farmers tan is somewhat less pronounced.
That night we went back to the festival, I had a seafood Brotchen and some Pakistani food, and we wandered to the parts we hadn't seen yet and watched some of the Euro 2008 match on the big screens. In the morning I packed my stuff and headed for the train station bound for Hamburg.
Janine has an older cousin who lives in Hamburg, and offered that I could stay with him. Unfortunately he had to stay out
Roger Hodgson
at the festival of town for work at the last minute, but kindly still let me stay at his apartment even though he wouldn't be there. I arrived in Hamburg before midday, locked my backpack at the train station, and went to the HafenCity information centre, which is a new development proposal for the port of Hamburg on the River Elbe. Unfortunately it was closed (Monday in Germany all the museums are closed). So I went nearby to the "Miniatur Wunderland", an enormous model train showing different parts of Europe. It was by far the geekiest thing I've ever seen. Almost all of the visitors there were adults but it seemed kind of aimed at children. It was ok, but I think not worth the seven euro admission. I had picked up a bit of a cold as well so maybe I was in a bad mood.
After that I got my bag and went to the apartment I was staying at. I met Janine's cousin's roommate, and then I went with her to dinner at her friend's apartment and met a bunch of other 30 year old young Hamburg professionals. We had a good dinner and some beer and the Germans
were pretty happy to practice their English on me. They all speak good English here. English is the international language - if a Swede and a Pole do business, they negotiate in English.
The next morning I headed to the HafenCity centre again and I really liked it. There's a big scale model of the mixed commercial and residential development, some history of Hamburg and a lot of information about the development. Afterwards i walked around the area which is an enormous construction site. It was cool to see the empty space and know what was going to be there. After that I went to the city hall and took a guided tour which was good. The city hall is really elaborate. That night I went to the supermarket, cooked some dinner, went to an internet cafe and went to sleep. I woke up early the next morning to take the train to Berlin.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.064s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 13; qc: 27; dbt: 0.0306s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb