Day 2 – Monday, 17th

Time: 8:15

We wake up, my alarm going off earlier than expected. I shower and brush my teeth before heading off to breakfast.

Time: 9:00

It's breakfast time! We go up to the buffet, which is somewhat bigger than anticipated. I have a brioche with Nutella, two croissants with strawberry jam, a bowl of cereal, and an apple. I also have two glasses of milk and some orange juice.

The orange juice is really thick and has an overly strong taste, to the point that most people who had it didn’t finish their glass. I notify the staff that something seems wrong with the orange juice before we head out to our first activity.

Time: 10:00

We leave the hotel and walk toward the central bus station, where we will take bus 41 directly to the pier and our first destination. But before we even step onto the bus, our teacher Tim informs us that he did not receive two teacher tickets for the bus in Kiel, and he will have to get them from the train station.

At this point, we are unsure if he will be back in time—though eventually, he does return. Before his arrival, we are confused about which bus to take, as there are two bus 41s going in opposite directions, and our travel planning sheet does not specify where to exit or which direction to go. Eventually, Robin figures it out and finds where we need to go for our first activity.

Time: ~10:30

We exit the bus at the docks of Kiel, walk a little further, and find our first activity… the AQUARIUM! I notice a student discount, so I save the group some money. 😃 The entry fee for a student is only €1.50, which makes me a little worried about how big the aquarium will be.

As I suspected, it turns out to be quite small—approximately 25x25 meters. However, we still enjoy the fish, as they are acting goofy (see attached image).

Time: 11:00

We leave the aquarium in record time after taking plenty of pictures and videos of the funny fish. We then head off to the cafés near the aquarium to find a place to eat. After looking at a few interesting options, we choose to go to Campus Suite on “Wall” Street.

I get a mozzarella bagel with tomato and drink an energy drink I bought from a shop on the way. The café is really cozy, and I enjoy the atmosphere a lot.

Time: ~12:30

We finish eating and relaxing around 12:30 and head off to the first stop on our digital tour around the city. This tour takes ages and fails to entertain us at all. At this point, some of us grab a bite to eat or browse a shop or two.

Here, I buy my first souvenir: two sets of D&D miniatures.

Time: 15:00

We give up on finishing the tour, as everyone has lost interest. As we grow colder and more tired, we decide to head to the mall to browse the shops and get some ideas for places to eat later in the week.

At MediaMarkt, I buy a new power bank and help some of the other students find a cable to connect their laptops to the TVs in their rooms.

Time: ~16:45

Everyone—except me—agrees that they are tired and want to go back to the hotel… I give in and go as well.

Time: ~17:00

We arrive back at the hotel. I jump into bed and start writing the first bit of the second entry for the blog.

From this point, the time stamps are left out as this part is being written the day after.

Around 7 O' clock, we meet up at the lobby of the hotel to go to a restaurant together. We have trouble deciding wich restaurant to go to, as we al have different diëtery needs and preferences. One of our caretakers, joice, gets the idea from google maps to go to some sort of "steakhouse". We decide to go there as it had something for everyone. The path there was jaged, and full of dark allyways that we didn't like very well. And as soon as we arived we realised that the so called "steakhouse" was just a turkisch kabab/everything place. Joice had forgotten to look at any fotos, at all. We then fall back to plan B, go to the mall and get something there. But as we were walking over someone googled the mall and found out the closing time was just 20:00! Wich meant that, when we arived, we only had 30 minutes to go somewhere and eat. And most restaurants in the mall, we found out a little later, already close some time before then. I had the idea to go to a sushi take out place in the mall, but i couldn't find it as google maps wwasn't working right. And the moment we DID find it, we were already too late. Eventually, we settled on going to the MC-Donalds at the trainstation. Wich is open 24/7 we came to find, and ate there. It was perfectly mediocre, just about how you'd expect MC-Donalds to taste like. Afterwards we went back to the hotel. Tim had the idea to play some games down in the lobby, so we played a few games of UNO, and two games of "valse motten" before heading of to our room to finish our journal and go sleep again.

Today's raiting, 7-10. I actually kind of enjoyed the aquarium and liked how we got to play some cardgames eventually.

Journal entries