Kieler Woche

So the week after Prague began with me sleeping until around 10 on Monday morning (we had gotten back fairly late Sunday night) and showing up to work a couple of hours late to find that my boss was gone for the day. Phew. But she was actually gone most of that week, so it ended up being pretty boring. Continuing reading my 1000 page book. Looking up stuff to do on the internet. The highlight of the workweek was when we went out to eat as a group to a traditional Frankfurt restaurant, and my boss (who was back at that point) offered to pay for my meal. Then after some minimal convincing from my coworkers, I ordered the largest plate on the menu, which was good and meaty. And then after the meal, no one seemed to want their peach schnapps shots (that are supposed to aid digestion), so I had about 4 as they all somehow got passed to me, and then subsequently relaxed the rest of my workday away behind my closed door. But the week outside of work was very enjoyable, full of World Cup game watching and frisbee playing.
Then, that Friday our group (Eric, Michelle, Kim, Mike, and Doug) headed out to Kieler Woche (Kiel Week), which is the largest sailing event in the world bringing about 3.5 million people during the week to Kiel, a town of about 300,000. The trip up there was pretty uneventful except that we ran into some drunk Russian that couldn't quite figure out how to operate a seat.....
Once we got to Kiel, we headed out of the train station to find some breakfast, and ran into some Americans. It ended up that these guys were doing this program called Congress Bundestag (or something close to that) where you spend your last year of high school studying in Germany (in their Gymnasium), which Eric and Michelle had both done back in high school, so they had a lot to talk about. Then we checked into our hostel which was amazingly nice! It was basically like a nice apartment with only two rooms for people to stay in and a really nice bathroom, kitchen, and living room.
The first thing on our list at Kiel was to go to the tall boat show where a couple hundred tall boats headed out of Kiel harbor to take a day tour of the Baltic Sea. It was really amazing to see! Here's a couple of my favorite pics....

Then after that we headed back into the heart of Kiel, found a park and had a picnic. Next, it was time to find a place to watch the Germany/Sweden game, so we headed towards the festival areas (there were tons of food stands, gift stands, promotional exhibits, ect., for the festival in this general area of the city) and ended up in a FIFA viewing area. FIFA sponsors quite a few of these types of areas that are great, with lots of space, huge screens, and lots of beverages. Unfortunately, though, when you have a couple million people visiting a town of a couple hundred thousand, things fill up really quickly. So after trying to squeeze through people and ending up smashed up against a bunch of smelly germans, we backtracked and found a motorcycle vendor place that had the game on and wasn't packed full with people. We sat down and started talking American, and the people right beside us noticed and it ended up that one of the guys was from the US studying in Kiel and had actually done that Congress Bundestag thing with Michelle back when she had done it! So they talked during the entire game and then he offered to show us the fun things to do in Kiel that night.
So we headed back to the hostel, freshened up and headed to get some food before meeting up with Michelle's friend, Mike. We passed through the international market square and looked at some cool things and eventually found a beer hall, which I was extremely excited about since they don't have any in Frankfurt and I heard that you have to go to Munich to find one. So we enjoyed liter beers and something similar to turkey legs and watched the Argentina/Mexico game. Kim, Michelle, and Doug actually left before the game was over to meet up with Mike, so Eric, our Mike, and I finished at the beer hall and started wandering around seeing what all was around at the festival. One thing we found was a nanotechnology stand (lol) that was selling amazingly useless stuff and I joked with Mike about how that's what I'd be doing soon. We also had started working on a bottle of cognac and consequently had ourselves a good time. Eventually the girls, Doug, and the other Mike joined up with us at a bar after determining that clubbing in Kiel (their original goal) was not going to be that enjoyable. Mike got some interesting pictures while we were at that bar (which those of you who can and care can see on facebook), and by the time we left the bar, I realized that I had probably taken a couple too many pulls on our cognac bottle, but we all made it home easily enough.
The next day we decided to take it easy and headed up the coast to a nice beach town. We relaxed in the sun and did some swimming in the crisp Baltic waters. Our train was pretty late heading back, so Mike had some time to find a liter bottle of beer that he was pretty proud of....
We made it to our train out of Kiel without too much rush and headed for Frankfurt at 250 kph on one of Germany's ICE trains.
Well, I'm still not caught up at all, but that'll have to do for now, have the France/Portugal game to watch with all the people who aren't too distraught after Germany's tragic loss yesterday :(