It was the 1st June 2016, my time living in Germany was officially over and it was time for me to head north; further north than I’d ever been before. Today all I had to do was get a train to Kiel and then catch my ferry to Gothenburg at around 18:00. This wasn’t going to be too difficult, as it was only 12:00pm and the train between Hamburg and Kiel only takes about 45 minutes; the real challenge here was how I was going to keep myself occupied for several hours.
In order to stop myself from arriving in Kiel too early, I took the slowest possible train route (come to think about it there are millions of slower train routes between Hamburg and Kiel but I thought it would be a bit pointless to travel via Marrakesh), one which travels through some of the most splendidly German sounding towns I’d ever heard of such as Ulzburg Süd and Lentföhrden. This long train journey did kill some time, and it did give me the opportunity to travel on some of Deutsche Bahn’s less glamorous rolling stock but I still arrived in Kiel ridiculously early.
Kiel is a decent sized city, it has a good shopping centre and the harbour is an interesting place to walk around. On top of this, it was actually a very warm day (according to some of my Facebook friends it was 17°C in the north of England so I was pretty lucky to be where I was). So whilst Kiel isn’t a bad place to be stuck for several hours I did have a bit of a problem; I was carrying about 15 kitchen sinks worth of stuff so therefore, my mobility was a bit limited, making me look like a naive tourist who’d over-packed. Whilst this was partially true, you need to consider that I had literally just moved out of somewhere where I’d been living for the last six months and also my brother was luckily going to meet me in Stockholm where he’d take a large portion of the things I didn’t need home. Unfortunately, Stockholm was still a couple of days away so in the meantime I had to walk everywhere feeling like a freight train.
Eventually, the time came to board the ferry; a floating hotel that would be my home for the next 14 hours. In case you’re wondering, the name of the ship was the Stena Germanica, one of the largest passenger ferries in Europe. In many ways it felt like I’d already left Germany, as this was a Swedish ship, owned by a Swedish company, the only German people on board being tourists and lorry drivers. After the ship departed, Kiel slowly disappeared behind us as we approached the Danish archipelago. This made it a bit of an unusual ferry journey, as I had been used to travelling simply from one coast to another, but here we were travelling between the various islands that made up Denmark, islands that were sometimes so close together we would actually pass underneath bridges. After a while of listening to pretty standard ferry entertainment by the bar I decided to go to bed, knowing that when I woke up I’d be somewhere near Sweden.
The World According to Webbo 