feels like "home"

 final cruise blog--  Warnemunde/Rostock, Germany and Tallinn, Estonia

Warnemunde and the North Sea

At the half-way point of our cruise we stopped at Warnemunde, Germany.  The cruise lines have dubbed Warnemunde the "Gateway to Berlin" and 90% of the passengers dutifully trekked to the train station at 5AM  for the 2 hour train ride into Berlin.  We watched them all pour out of the trains 14 hours later, exhausted.  As D and I have already been to Berlin, we skipped the fun and stayed in port.   Our table-mates (who live in Landsthul)  also skipped  Berlin. They ventured to the beach.  D and I grabbed B and bopped over to Rostock, the area's historic county seat.

Rostock Market Square

As we left the port, we had to pass through customs control.  They had two lines: one for passengers and one for crew members.  The lines, however, were not clearly marked. (Surprise surprise -- Europeans, even the super orderly German variety, can't queue).  D and I ended up going through the crew turnstyle.  The German bean counter nearly had a meltdown.  Welcome "home", I thought.

Shopping and the big red balloon

It happened to be market day in Rostock, so we bought cheese and bread and fruit for lunch and strolled the main shopping district.  If we hadn't been living here for the past two years, we would have marvelled at the quaintness of it, but Rostock's market is like any other market in any other town.  We did, however, get to get our shop on at the T.J. Maxx buying a winter coat for C and some fill-in clothes for D.  See, upon leaving Dover, D and I had a misunderstanding.  I had packed for the boys and I had packed for myself.  I packed for our weekend in Dover separately.  I thought I had explained perfectly well that the dirty clothes from Dover were spending the cruise in the car.  D missed the memo, and by our halfway point he was running out of clothes, even though I had already done laundry once.  The rest of us could get home without doing more wash, so I couldn't help but laugh when I found him in the men's department with a shopping basket full of underwear, socks, and t shirts.   I guess he didn't want to do laundry either.

the shipyard

  The best thing about Warnemunde is that it made me feel better about my limited German language skills.  Most of the time, here, when I try to speak German, the locals look at me like I have horns growing out of my head.  In Rostock, however, every market vendor, barrista, and store clerk understood me.   I'm not sure whether the difference is dialect or if in a tourist area the locals are more willing to roll with an outsider's slight mispronounciations and figure things out.  Probably a little of both.

It's not a bad thing, to stay on the boat when every one else goes exploring.  There were no character meet-and-greets in port, but there were still activities, demonstrations, movies, and other fun to be had.  As we left Warnemunde that evening the boat --the Disney Magic-- sailed right past the shipyard where she was built.  As a side note, Disney's newest cruise liner, the Disney Dream, is being built in another German shipyard, in Papenburg, about 3hours from us.  It's due to leave dry-dock this weekend and then float out to sea in the next couple of weeks.


Tallinn, Estonia

Of the 7 ports of call, Tallinn was the one I was most excited about.  The thought of going to St. Petersburg was cool, but going to Estonia sounded downright exotic.  I mean Estonia of "Estonia-Latvia-and-Lithuania" fame, one of the big three Baltic rebels that told the USSR to stuff it.  We've seen a lot of Europe, but I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow going to Estonia would make us world travelers in a way that going to Italy, Austria, or even Poland just couldn't.



Except...
No one ever told me and I never bothered to learn that Estonia spent much of her life under German rule, was established by Germanic peoples, and looks and feels a lot like any other German city.  I kid you not, if you blindfolded me and plopped me in the middle of Tallinn's historic district, I could have been in Heidelberg, Rothenburg, Monschau, or any other historic German city.

Sweater Wall -- stall after stall of knitted items

 We took B with us into Tallinn so we wandered the historic district, followed along with a walking tour, climbed some old ruins, drank some good beer, and ducked into a local church or two, one of which was the picturesque Russian church, which apparently the Estonians hate, but  keep  around as a political and cultural peace offering to the Russian minority that still calls Estonia home.   Before heading back to the boat, we detoured to an Estonian grocery store to buy diapers.  I had brought plenty, I thought.  But B spent a lot more time in the nursery than we anticipated and I think they changed the kids hourly, whether they needed it or not, and I was running low.  Diapers on board cost a whopping $1.50 a piece.  I'm happy to report that Estonian pampers are just like the German ones.  As we re-boarded the ship each day we had to pass through metal detectors and have our bags x-rayed.  I caused the crew members manning the machines to chuckle as I sent my mega-pack of 100 Pampers through to be scanned.  (It was the smallest bunch they had in B's size) --  Good Times!

View to the port from the ramparts

Tallinn's New Town