Visit from Home

On Monday, I started aerobics. Let’s just say that everyone knew that I hadn’t been there before. I didn’t know where I was supposed to go and a lot of other things in addition to this, but it is fun. I also found out on Sunday night that my school was having an Orchester concert in the “Schloss” in Kiel. Just a little heads up for those of you who don’t know what a Schloss is. It is a palace or castle, however, one would not recognize the “Schloss” in Kiel as such because it looks nothing like a palace or castle. This is besides the point, but I do find it funny. Anyway the concert was to take place in the concert hall of the “Schloss” and the tickets are originally 10 Euro, but all staff members receive two free tickets and so I invited Dierdre the Canadian assistant in Kiel to come along with me to my student’s concert. It was actually very nice. They started out with classical composers the first half and the second half was modern music from famous films such as Pirates of the Carribean and Harry Potter. All of the students even those not participating were required to go to the concert so I saw a lot of them there.

Tuesday I started my trampoline gymnastics class at the university. It is tons of fun and I get to be around people my age! I have jumped around on a trampoline before and can do flips and such, but I have never learned the actual way you are supposed to do it according to competition and Olympic rules. This is what we do in the class. There are certain ways you have to jump and certain ways to move your arms. This is really interesting to learn and it is a workout at the same time!!

Wednesday…can’t really remember anything special about this day.

Thursday I got lucky and didn’t have school because they had an in-service day. This worked out really well because Dr. Menz (Harald) was in Germany and had planned to come and visit this weekend. He arrived on Thursday on one of the only trains that was driving (most didn’t run because of the strike). I picked him up from the main station and took him to his guesthouse. Then I gave him the grand tour of Kiel. It was really nice to be able to show someone from home around the city that has become my home and will be my home for another 7 months. It’s even better when the person is interested in what your doing. It was funny to see some of the things that struck him as odd about the city that I now find normal after three months, for example the accent and dialect spoken here and the huge cruise ships that come into the harbor. I don’t know if I have said this before, but Kiel is not much of a tourist city. The only things that attract tourists are the beaches in the surrounding area, so there wasn’t a whole lot to show him. We spent the afternoon walking along the harbor, through the old part of the city (this isn’t much), and through one of the parks. We also saw some seals being fed at the aquarium. Then we found a café and spent a lot of time talking about his Namibian/German research and my job here. In the evening we went out for Chinese.

Friday I had school as usual and later I met Harald again. He said that he had to “see the sea” while he was here, so we had planned to take the bus to Schilksee and to walk from there along the coast to Strande. The bus ride itself takes about about an hour from the city so after this we were ready for dinner and he happened to see a Baltic restaurant called “Dubrovnik” –the name of a city in Croatia. We decided to give this a try and it turned out to be a good choice. I had a meal called Satarasch, which is rice with a cooked meat, eggs, and fresh veggies in a spicy sauce. It was delicious. Harald had Cevapcici with rice. After dinner we went out for a drink at Mango’s for his birthday. I won’t say how old he is because he is also reading this blog : )

On the weekend, we traveled to Bremen. On Saturday we left our luggage at the station and then went on a tour of the city. I had been there once before with my friends Kathrin and Miriam, but to be honest I didn’t remember much about how the city looked because we saw it at night. Bremen is a beautiful city with lots of interesting architecture and it is also a harbor city. It was part of the Hanseatic League in the North. After taking pictures and seeing everything, we found a café so that we could unfreeze ourselves…I am not kidding! It was so cold there. We then went to get our bags at the station and checked into our hotel rooms. We decided to make dinner cheap and went to a store at the station (we walked around for about 45 minutes and didn’t find a single supermarket! This puzzled us…) where we bought bread rolls, lunch meat, cheese, nectarines and yogurt.

On Sunday we took the train to Bremerhaven. Harald had wanted to go to the German Emigration Museum. This was also a good choice. It was really interesting and was mainly over the emigration to the U.S. because that is where the largest number of Germans have emigrated. It reminded us of the Holocaust museum in a lot of ways because they had rebuilt ship rooms and such to make it look like it had back in the day. There was an overwhelming amount of information and you could even trace your ancestry at the end if you had the names. After the museum, we walked to the harbor to photograph a large four mast ship. An old woman informed us that you could go on board and look around free of charge, so we did. It turns out the ship belongs to the Russian Navy and there were some quite good looking Sailors on board! Don’t worry, I also looked at the ship J I had never been on such a ship, so this was fun. After the tour of the ship, it was once again time to find a café. I don’t know what it is about when you are looking for something you never find it and when you aren’t, you stumble upon it. So once again we were walking for at least half an hour before we found a café that was open. Keep in mind it is also Sunday, which usually means that most things are closed. After almost giving up we ran into an open café. Later we headed back to Bremen and found a cheap but nice restaurant called Casablanca where we ate dinner (of course along the way we found the supermarket we had been searching for the day before).

On Monday we grabbed breakfast at a Baker and headed back into the old city center of Bremen and walked around the area called “Schnoor.” This means ‘chain’ in Plattdeutsch, the northern German dialect. It is called this because it is a part of the town where all the houses were built on top of each other and they are really small. It was really beautiful. Then we checked out of our rooms and headed back to the station to catch our trains. Harald headed to the Duesseldorf airport to leave for Namibia and I headed back to Kiel on a delayed train. I was really glad that he took the time to come visit me. It was great to be able to share my experience here with him and to find out what’s going on at home. In addition, it was nice to leave Kiel and travel somewhere new. I haven't gotten to do this too much since I have been here so it broke up the monotony.