Kiel

On Friday, we headed off to the Amsterdam train station for the ride to Germany to visit our friends Reinhard & Hildegard (from Rice grad school days). We had no trouble finding our train, and the first part of our ride went ok, but we wound up hitting a delay in Osnabruck of 30 minutes, which meant that we missed our connection in Hamburg. We were able to get on the next train to Kiel in fairly short order, but in the intervening time I discovered that I had failed to write down any of the important info for my friend (no phone number, no address). Yikes. When we arrived, we hunted around for a phone book (they weren't listed) and tromped around the station looking for one of them, with no success. I finally had to run down the street to an internet cafe, rent a few minutes on a PC (for 50 euro cents, not bad) and bring up Google mail so that I could copy down the info. Sure enough, when we got back to the station it turned out that Hildegard had been there waiting for us all along-- somehow we had managed to walk right by each other in the hustle and bustle. This once again proves my total incompetence when it comes to matters of travel arrangements: the one thing that Amy leaves me to do (write down the address & phone) and I blow it. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

Reinhard & Hildegard have a really nice house in the Kronshagen neighborhood of Kiel, about a 10 minute bike ride from the university and from the city center. Lovely back garden, with lots of nice trees and plenty of space for the kids to run around.




They've recently redone their kitchen (much envy on the part of Amy and myself). Hildegard cooked us a nice dinner and we had an enjoyable evening getting caught up with them while the kids played around together. Their kids are slightly older than ours; Julia is maybe a year or two older than Ethan and I think Nora is a year ahead of Lydia.

On Saturday after a nice breakfast, we hopped in the car (along with a few of us on bikes) and drove down to the central station to pick up a ferryboat. The local ferry makes stops along both sides of the "fjord" (this is what they call it) that Kiel is part of, so it's a pleasant way to see the area waterways. We took it as far as Laboue, a sort of beach resort town located on the east side of the fjord a bit to the north. We had lunch, and the kids had a lot of fun running around and playing on the beach.



The weather was actually quite nice-- still rather cool and windy, but with warm sun, so if you could find a sheltered spot it was quite pleasant. We also walked up the beach a ways to where they had an old WW-2 era U-Boat, which you could pay a couple of Euros to go inside and clamber around. I had never seen one before up close, so that was interesting. They packed an astonishing number of people into those things (crew of 56 in an absolutely tiny space).

The harbor area and the fjord is very active, with lots of shipping, sailboats, ferries, even kayaks.

Sunday we had another very lazy day-- Amy and I went running in the morning, then we took off to see Reinhard's office at the university (his computer lab has a pinball machine of all things, so the kids had some fun with that). We had lunch at a big beer-garden / restaurant in the middle of one of the city parks; very pleasant. After that we headed home, packed up, and Reinhard very kindly drove us to the airport in Hamburg, about an hour away.

An excellent trip-- I think everyone feels very much recharged.