This Baltic Sea cruise stop is the jumping off point to Berlin. It is however a long day, really long, like 12.5 hours long. We’ve done it, years ago but we weren’t interested in repeating it this time. It was a great tour and we enjoyed it we just don’t want to do it again.
Today we took a private group tour that covered Warnemunde and Rostock, a nearby city. There were about 10 people on our walking tour and it lasted over 5 hours, that’s a lot of walking but it was interesting.
We started out in Warnemunde. It’s strictly a tourist city, but not (just for) cruise passengers. It’s a summer destination for Germans and other Europeans. There are lots of restaurants and shops. One thing that tells you that cruise ship passengers are an afterthought is the absence of English language menus posted. You can ask for them of course but that can cause problems as we discovered later in the day.
After seeing Warnemunde, we hopped on the local commuter train to Rostock, about 20 minutes away. From there we hopped a tram to the downtown area. Our guide was watching us like a hawk, making sure we stayed together. He did a very good job…until the end of the day but we’ll get to that later.
Rostock is an ancient town with buildings dating back to the 1100’s and probably earlier. It has the usual collection of attractive streets, pedestrian shopping ways and churches. In Rostock, the churches are Lutheran. We’ve mostly seen Catholic ones up till now. It was also once a walled city, most of it has been taken down but a stretch survives today.
One of the churches has an astronomical clock, similar to the one we saw in Prague, but way more complicated. For decades they thought it was broken beyond repair but in 1954 it was cleaned and started working again. The clock can be set and will still be accurate for over 130 years we were told. In the pictures below you can see the two clock faces and I zoomed in on today’s date, the 29th, so it was accurate today. It does have to be wound and that takes 10 minutes each day.
Rostock was bombed during WWII. There were munition factories nearby making it a target. It was rebuilt slowly but it really didn’t flourish until after German unification in 1990. Before that the East German government didn’t have the money or materials to restore bombed cities. The Soviets didn’t have a Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe like the U.S. did. In fact, the Soviets took many valuable materials from (East) Germany as war reparations.
Our guide, who lives in Rostock, told us that in 2019 he had to be evacuated from his house when an unexploded (American) bomb was found at a construction site. Every new build in Rostock requires an inspection for WWII ordinance before construction can begin.
We went to see the University it has many beautiful buildings and one famous oddity. We actually knew this story but didn’t know the bird was actually in Rostock.
This stork flew to Rostock in the early 1800’s with the arrow embedded in its body. The arrow was of African origin. Scientists knew nothing of migration patterns up until this time but now they knew that when storks left the area they flew all the way to Africa. This started a whole new field of study for biologists.
After this stop we were on our way back to Warnemunde via tram and then train. All went well until we got to the train station. There were two sets of stairs to go up so the guide pointed to an elevator to see if anyone needed it and one person did but he didn’t see her so failed to give more specific directions for when she got out. So, we all made it to the platform and one of the women said, where’s my mom? She was nowhere to be found. The guide and the daughter formed a search party and went looking. Meanwhile Fred and I stayed at the top of the stairs so that she would see someone she recognized if she came that way. She saw us and all was well!
When we got back to Warnemunde it was about 3PM and we’d been on this tour since before 9AM. We were hungry and wanted to try out one of the local restaurants. There was no English menu but you could use their QR code to look at one. The German menus and the English ones didn’t have some of the same dishes but we thought we could point and get what we want. When the waitress approached and we spoke English she said, ‘oh no, not English’. She didn’t speak it very well and bottom line I got what I wanted but Fred got something totally different and we’re not sure what it was. He said it was good though.
It was a long day but I’m glad we stayed in the area and had a look around here.
Tomorrow is a sea day and on Friday we’ll be in Tallin, Estonia.
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