Beaches, Towers, Rivers and Ruins

Katy left yesterday and I am already looking forward to seeing her again, well, her and a whole bunch of other people. Here is what our adventures held for us over the last few days:

I woke up a little earlier than Katy did on Friday so I could ride my bike 4.5km to pick up the package my parents sent. It was a pleasant, sunny, but also quite windy day. 4.5km, no big deal, I have done that before. It turned out to be longer than I was expecting, and once I got to the post office and proudly presented my package slip, the worker who helped me, looked at me and said, "well that is nice, but your package isn't here." It was actually dropped off at the post office which is very near where I live. Yes, this does make sense, but I followed the address which was on the front of the post card. Once I made it to the post office, I found out I had to pay taxes on it, which was frustrating. And the women there said the debit card machine may not work. In the end it did, which was good, since I had a total of 5 euros on me.

Once I got back and opened my package, which was filled with winter apparel and other fun goodies my parents packed inside, it was go time. Meaning shower, breakfast and get our stuff ready to go because we were going to Rostock! Our train left around 2pm, and were taking the bus (my first time here in Greifswald!). While we were rushing out the door and I realized that we didn't pack our sleeping bags, whatever, we could deal with that. We made it to the train station with time to spare, bought our ticket and waited patiently for the train. Unfortunately, that train was never going to come. The German train system is on strike right now. This isn't as bad as it sounds, but it isn't good. They are mostly striking with the local trains, and not even all of them, and generally only on Fridays. Unfortunately, it was a Friday and we happened to be lucky enough to have our ride canceled. We only had to wait about 40 minutes for the next train to take us to Stralsund. The problem then came with our connection. Our connecting train only train only ran every two hours, which meant we had to wait an extra 1.5 hours in Stralsund. This actually turned out to be really nice because it was a sunny day, we decided to hike the 221 steps up the tallest church tower and get a great view of the surrounding area.

Our train to Rostock was running, but 15 minutes late, we were fine with that, as long as it was running. Once we boarded the train, we had a nice and relaxing ride to the city. Shaun, a fellow English Language Assistant was going to meet and host us for the night. He lives on the outskirts of the city, and needed to take the S-bahn to meet us at the train station. These trains were running earlier in the day, and then around quiting time, decided to strike. This meant that Shaun was about 45 minutes late in meeting us. The rest of the night, things ran smoothly. We had dinner, went to a local student hang out, and then to a student club. The music at the club was always good when we weren't dancing and always poor when we were dancing. Once we got back to the room for the night, we had to decide how we were going to sleep. Shaun offered his bed, while he slept on the floor with his sleeping bag. I took the floor and slept with a thin fleece blanket and my coat. My pillow was a pair of pants and I slept at about two hour increments.

Saturday was another glorious da light lunch, we headed back and caught the train home. No problems with transportation this time. During lunch, Shaun asked this, "So if the pope is the highest up you can go, who does he confess to?" Which of course made me laugh, and I informed him that while the Catholic church does have a hierarchy, the pope can, in fact, confess to any other priest. But I do see his confusion. The thing Katy really wanted to do was to see the Baltic sea, and we finally did that. We took the train to a part of town called, Warnemünde. It was beautiful. There were beaches and ferries and seagulls and lots of people out enjoying the last of the nice weather. We didn't do anything spectacular, the view was enough for us. After a reasoning.

After the no sleep and making dinner on Saturday, Katy and I were beat and decided to stay in, which was great since I fell asleep at 10.30pm, the earliest I have been to bed in a long time. But we had church to be up for on Sunday. The weather stayed great, and walked and were late to church. Afterwards, we had dinner with about eight other students. They made lasagna and we had pudding with cherries for dessert, delicious. The last thing we decided to do was walk along the river to the beach. This is about an hour in half walk, but we didn't care, and we actually had four other German students join us, which was somewhat of a surprise. When we finally got to the beach, there was some complaining about how it isn't a nice beach, but one of the guys just said, We walked here to come to the beach, and we are going to the beach! Of course, I loved it, because I love the beach. We christened my new Frisbee and piqued some Ultimate interest while doing that.

There are also ruins of a monastery right around there, and since I hadn't seen them yet, and Katy hadn't either, that was our last stop. They were founded in 1199 and then pieces of the monastery were used when building other buildings in town. It still makes me wonder how they built such strong buildings hundreds of years ago, so that they are still somewhat standing, and today we build something, and it has to be taken down after 20 years or so.

So Katy left yesterday morning, and I spent the whole day laying around and relaxing, which I completely justified since we were busy the entire last week. Now I am figuring out my schedule for Fall Break, which is coming up soon, as in, leaving Thursday afternoon to start my adventures!