A day out in Rügen

This weekend bought my first visitor to this part of the world, Grace, from my Uni course. It was great to see her, and to show her around, and on Saturday we went to Rügen with Georgina and Carli, and Jeremy, obviously. Rügen is the island you can see from Stralsund. The guidebooks always mention that it's Germany's biggest island, and you can get to it with a train or car, as there is a giant bridge connecting it to the mainland.

Jeremy, for those of you who don't know, is the pink elephant who has had a very complicated lifestory, including a kidnap, ransom and subsequent release, and an ongoing custody battle between Becca and Zaq. He is spending this year in Germany with me, and I have to provide photographic evidence of his sightseeing.

Luckily everyone else joined in with that task, and Jeremy's trip to Rügen is well documented.

It was a really good weekend, even if it did involve a lot of sitting around at train stations. We missed the first possible train by about 5 seconds, we were just about to push the 'open door' butten when it pulled away. Foiled by the efficiency of the German transport system. So we waited at the station for half an hour, then got the next train onto the island. It went to a different town to the first train, but we'd planned to go there anyway. However, as we were travelling on a special group ticket, we weren't allowed to use the fast IC trains, which meant the ticket inspector came around, checked our ticket and informed us that we'd have to get out at the next station, or pay for a new ticket. So we had an unscheduled stop at Bergen. As the town seemed to be quite a distance from the train station, and we only had about 20 minutes, we didn't really see a lot. But still, if anyone asks about Bergen, I've officially been there and done that.

We eventually got to Binz, saw the sea, walked along the beach promenade, and had lunch in an Italian restaurant that also did locally caught fish dishes, and German specialities. The waiter taught us how to say everything in Italian. After a wander around the town, we got the train to Lietzow, where we had to change trains. Luckily we only had 20 minutes in Lietzow, and even then we had to resort in trying out the self timer functions on our cameras (with varying degrees of success). There were two platforms, a sign saying 'Lietzow', a bench, a clock, and nothing else. There was a slight fear that the train wouldn't come, and we'd be left there for ever, so it was a relief when it arrived, and we were able to get on our way to Sassnitz. We'd been trying to get there since 10 o'clock that morning, we eventually arrived at about 3pm, and the boat trips out around the island weren't running anymore. Oh well, we'll have to come back. We saw a lot of the town anyway, and the famous chalk cliffs- the inspiration for Caspar Davis Friedrich's paintings, don't you know. (Grace and I learnt about Romantic- Expressionist artists in one of our modules last year) Then we concluded our tour of Rügen's train stations with an hour wait at Sassnitz station. -It was either that or go back and change at Lietzow again, this time in the dark... At least Sassnitz station offered a place to sit that was inside.

T'was a good weekend.