Germany is awesome!  I think Germany has probably been one the best ports that we’ve visited this deployment.  There was festival in Kiel that we were told is the biggest festival in Germany all year.  There was a lot of food, and many of the stands had food from many different countries.  You could go from stand to stand and try food from all around the world.  There were a lot of stages set up throughout the downtown area for live music.  Much of the singing was in German, but a lot of American entertainment makes it’s way to Europe, so a lot of the music was recognizable.  On Sunday and Monday I went to Hamburg, which is the nearest large city in Germany.  I got a lot of pictures from both Kiel and Hamburg, and I will be posting them to Flickr soon.

We pulled in on Friday, and it was pouring rain.  They called reveille early, and we had all the lines hauled up by 0515.  Unfortunately, I got pretty wet while we were hauling the lines up.  I put on a plastic rainsuit later, but since I was still a little damp underneath the rainsuit.  I was definitely glad that I had it later, and when we were tossing the mooring lines to the pier most of the other linehandlers got drenched.  This made for a bad first impression of Kiel, but I went on liberty that evening.  We stopped at an Italian restaurant for dinner, and the food was really good.  I got a steak (as usual), and the spaghetti and pizza that the other guys got was pretty good.  We walked around for a bit more that evening, but most of the stores were closed, so we ended up heading back to the ship.

Saturday was a duty day, and I was supposed to have the 0700-1200 pier watch, but there were two of us assigned to the watch.  We didn’t need both people standing watch on the pier, so the other guy, who was junior to me, stood the rest of the watch.  It is the responsibility of the host country to provide armed sentries on the pier, so we didn’t really need two of us standing on the pier.  The rest of the duty day was quiet.  We had training in the afternoon to learn about the proper responses to a swimmer attack or a fire or flooding problem.  It rained almost all day Saturday, and it was a good day to have duty.  I went to bed relatively early, so that I would be prepared for liberty the next day.

By Sunday the skies had cleared, and we swept all the water off the decks before we turned over duty to the next duty section.  I did some research online to find out how expensive it would be to get to Berlin, but it turned out that it would cost 148 Euro for one person to get from Kiel to Berlin, and it would take over 3 hours!  That was a little too much over budget, and we figured Hamburg would probably be pretty interesting.  Hamburg was only a 1 hour train ride away, and it only cost 29 Euro for 1-5 people to ride to Hamburg.  It’s a good deal, because the one 29 Euro ticket is good for all 5 people.

So by Sunday afternoon I found myself walking around downtown Hamburg.  It is a big city, and you definitely need a map to find your way around the city.  I have been trying to get lost, just to see if I can do it, but my sense of direction hasn’t failed me yet.  Despite our not having a map, we found a lot of stuff to take pictures of.  Almost all the stores were all closed, so we didn’t really want to stay in Hamburg very long, since we wouldn’t really be able to do anything else.

We headed back to Kiel, where the festival was in full swing.  We found many small booths with a lot of interesting food to try.  There was one of those gigantic towers where a large platform goes all the way to the top and then falls rapidly.  It was fun to watch, but I didn’t go on it.  We spent the rest of the evening walking around the festival and listening to the live music.  The evening passed pretty quickly, and it was the first time that I took advantage of my new liberty hours.  As a 2^nd Class I am able to stay out until 0100 instead of the midnight time for 3^rd classes.  We got back to the ship at 0018 and went directly to sleep.

Monday morning I was still debating on going to Berlin, but I still didn’t want to spend that much money.  I went to Hamburg again, but this time it was with a couple of the other ETs.  After my experience with the city from the day before, I went there with a purpose this time.  We wanted to see all of the major sights in the city that we could.  I found an excellent tourist book in the train station, and we used it’s map to guide us to most of the major buildings.  One of the most impressive things in the city was the catholic cathedral that was bombed during WWII.  Only the tall pointed tower remains, and the rest of the Cathedral was never rebuilt.  There is another cathedral not far from the bombed one, which we also visited.  The ruined cathedral has a lot of pictures of the extent of the damage to the city from all the bombing.  There was an elevator that went all the way to the top of the tower which is the only remaining part of the cathedral, and it was an amazing view from the top of it.

The other cathedral, which was obviously built within the last century, was also very tall, and we went to the top of it also.  We could have taken the elevator, but we felt adventurous and took the stairs.  I would recommend the elevator!  We were huffing and puffing by the time we got all the way to the top.  The view was just as rewarding as the view from the top of the other cathedral’s tower, and I got a lot of pictures of the city.  We took the elevator back down the tower, and continued our tour of the city.

By this time it was about 1600, and some places were beginning to close.  We tired to stop by the Museum of Hamburg History, but it was closed.  It was beginning to rain by now, and we were beginning to get hungry.  We found an electronics store that must be the biggest electronics store in existence.  It had a total of 6 floors, and it had almost everything imaginable for electronics.  There was one entire floor dedicated to TVs, and one of the floors was all music and movies.  There was also an Internet Café in this store, so we each bought 30 minutes of Internet time to check our Hotmail and chat with anyone from back home that might be online.  The most amazing thing was that the only thing that I bought in the entire electronics store was a package of AA batteries.  J  I looked through the laptops, and browsed through the European techno selection, but didn’t find anything that I really wanted.

We stopped in a restaurant to get some dinner, and found a nice lounge where a waitress was very talkative and discussed a lot with us about Germany and some of the interesting things to see.  It turned out that we missed a few things, but maybe someday I’ll come back to the Hamburg.  The waitress was very friendly, and wanted us to look her up again if we ever returned to Hamburg.

We were about tired of tourism by the time Monday came to a close.  We grabbed a couple of pieces of pizza in the train station before heading back to the base via one of the many plentiful taxis.  I would definitely like to come back to Germany someday. 

The next morning was slightly cloudy as we pulled out, and the Germans had a marching band that sent us off.  It was pretty moving to hear them playing our national anthem as we were pulling away from the pier.

Everyone on the ship is looking forward to returning to Norfolk.  Even though we stopped in Norfolk during the middle of this deployment, it feels like we’ve been gone for a very long time.  Most people have countdowns on the whiteboards in our workspaces, counting the days until we return.  There are still some interesting ports left, which I will take full advantage of, but everyone is anticipating returning to Norfolk.

Thank you for the many emails that I got about my advancement to 2^nd Class.  News from home is always appreciated.