The Adventure Continues

What an exciting European vacation we’ve had so far!  Every day is incredible and the weather has been beautiful.  We were a part of history on Friday during our day in Berlin as we had record high temperatures and they recorded the hottest day in decades!  Albeit dripping with sweat, we still loved Berlin.  The city is full of rich history, fantastic sights and great people.  A three hour (non air-conditioned) train ride took us to the heart of Berlin from the port of Warnemunde.  Warnemunde is a quaint port fast becoming a great seaside vacation village.

Olaf, our tour guide, greeted us in Berlin. We didn’t like anyone on our bus – people who continually complained about the lack of air conditioning, but we stuck together.  Olaf was one of the best tour guides we’ve had so far – he even offered to mail our post cards from his house!  We enjoyed a delicious German-fare lunch from the Westin hotel in the heart of the city before seeing more sights in the afternoon.  The day became increasingly longer, as the train that was scheduled to pick us up had some locomotive problems and was delayed by several hours.  During the time we were supposed to be boarding our ship (around 7:30 pm), we were actually just getting on the train.  Needless to say, it was a long (and smelly/sweaty) trip back to port.   We raced to dinner where our fantastic servers, Melroy and Maria greeted us and brought us drinks to fuel our thirst and rehydrate us.  

Thankfully, we had yesterday to catch up on our rest.  Who knew that you could get sunburned on route to Russia?  Thomas and Naaman enjoyed a pub crawl throughout the ship last night after their rum tasting while MT and Molly continued to relax down at Sessions (our favorite martini lounge).  We are fast becoming friends with the bartenders.  J 

We went to bed last night at 2:00 am, and it was still daylight.  This part of Europe records about 44 minutes of “nighttime” each night at this time of year.  As I’m typing this at 11:00 pm, it looks like it could be 6:00 in the evening.  It’s quite incredible!   We are loving it. 

This afternoon we traveled into St. Petersburg, Russia to do shopping.  You can only enter Russia on your own if you have a Russian visa, so all our outings are the ship’s excursions.  After dinner, we went out again on “twilight” boat cruise highlighting some of the great architecture of Russia including the Church of the Spilled Blood – a most beautiful sight!  We are looking forward to tomorrow when we travel throughout St. Petersburg and visit the Hermitage museum – we’ll see how many of the 10,000 rooms and 300,000 pieces we’ll be able to see.

Our servers at dinner (Melroy and Maria) continue to keep us well fed.  Although there are only four of us, we average five to six dinners a night and at least six to seven desserts.  Maria surprises Naaman with a special after-dinner dessert drink every night, and we continue to keep them laughing with our jokes and sarcastic wit.

Until tomorrow, Nakemiin (goodbye in Russian)