Hello there to everybody,
For those who are interested, I thought I might fill you in on a few things that I've been getting up to lately. 2 weekends ago I went up to the north of the country with a couple of my housemates. One of them is a german, who has a house in Kiel, and the other is a particularly french frenchman. It is only about 500 km from Dortmund to Kiel, so I was looking forward to flying up the Autobahn and getting there in 3 hours. Unfortunately, we chose a time to leave when it seemed that every man and his dog in the whole Ruhr Valley also was wanting to head up north. This meant that it took us over an hour to get just 20 km out of Dortmund. Honestly, what's the point of having these wonderful Autobahns with no speed limits, when you're lucky to reach 25kmh? Anyway, after a torturous hour or so stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, we finally escaped the congestion and cruised up north at the leisurely pace of 190kmh, arriving in Kiel just after nightfall on Friday evening.
Kiel is an interesting place, about the size of Canberra, and is also a very important maritime city on the Baltic sea. It has immense strategic importance, as there is a canal that runs between the fiord of Kiel on thebaltic sea and the north sea. This allows ships to cut straight through the Jutland Peninsula, and I believe it was built by the Kaiser prior to WW1 so that Britain couldn't blockade the German Navy. The German U Boat fleet wasbased there during the 2 world wars, and still is. In fact, there is a fully intact WW2 era U Boat on one of the main beaches, which I got a few nice snaps of.
In addition to having a fine naval tradition, Kiel also has a sizeable student population, meaning that there are some very fine nightclubs in the city centre. Naturally we endeavoured to visit as many of them as possible, and wound up at 5 in the morning walking through the red light district, where I happened to find the greatest Döner Kebab I have ever eaten. I had heard rumours about the quality of the Kiel Kebabs, but nothing had prepared me for this. If you can think of the Kebab that I described in my previous email, but longer, with a deeper pouch, more succulent meat and the hottest chilli sauce you can imagine, then you would have a good idea of why I loved it so... This really was a Döner worth writing home about.
Anyway, after sleeping for most of the following day, we stocked up on alcohol then psyched ourselved up for our little excursion to Hamburg. After knocking back a few preliminaries in Kiel, then a few more on the bus to the train station, we got our 1 hour train to St Pauli, the seedy downtown partof Hamburg, home of the famous Reeperbahn. This place was crazy, teeming with thousands of people, all there to either visit the many nightclubs, sexcinemas, or ladies of the night. So we wandered around the place for acouple of hours, seeing the sights and stopping occasionally at a nightclub to wet our whistles. Eventually we got a train back to Kiel at about 7 in the morning, and slept through most of the next day. We did however get up in time to catch a few sun rays, and went down to the beach at about 4 in the afternoon. Now I couldn't travel all the way to Kiel and not go for aswim, so ignoring the fact that it was only about 15 degrees, and the water temperature was maybe half that, I pulled on my boardies and went for a dip. Now I've swum at Robe in the winter, so I thought I could handle the Baltic sea, but after 5 minutes in the water, I could feel some mild hypothermiacoming on, so I wisely pulled up stumps and got the hell out of there. After towelling myself down and attracting some perculiar looks from passers by,we all went up to the beach front cafe, where I had a nice hot glass of grog to warm me up. What a pleasant experience that was... quite character building I thought. There's a happy snap of me after my swim attached to this post. Take note of the crazy looking, hypothermia affected eyes!
Anyway, after driving back down to Dortmund on Monday, I managed a bit of shut eye before heading out in Dortmund for Halloween. The day after halloween is a public holiday in Germany, so on monday night all of thenighclubs were absolutely packed. While it was a fun night out, it didn't quite reach the dizzying heights of Kiel and Hamburg, and all it really did was make the cold I caught after swimming even worse. Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed going back to school on the wednesday. So, that is a little synopsis of what I've been doing lately. This weekend I'm heading down to Frankfurt to catch up with Ralf Eckey, a mate of mine who has a nice little apartment in the city with a fridge full of beer. Should be fun....I hope this post was interesting, and I would love it if any of you felt like filling me in on what is happening in your worlds right now. All news is good news when you're living in a crazy share house full of bulgarians.
Cheers to all, Ed.
1 comment:
Kiel rulez!
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