Cruise!

It's quite nice being on a cruise after budget traveling for the last week. Getting on went smoothly. We got to the port, dropped off the band and took a detour walk to see the Little Mermaid statue before boarding. Unfortunately, no one wanted to sing Dismey songs with me when we got there.

Anyway, making it to the ship meant that we got some of the luxuries that we, right have taken for granted in the States.

For one, we get as much water as we want. Water is crazy expensive in Europe. In some places, such as Denmark, you have to pay for tap water in restaurants. Apart from Paris, public water fountains have been somewhat rare. We've been quite dehydrated.

On the other side, we also don't have to pay an arm and a leg for bathrooms. Free public restrooms are hard to come by in Europe.

We also get heaps of food. Some of us went crazy when we encountered the line of food. Then they fell into food comas. Not naming names though.

The ships are nice. We have a pretty sweet balcony. Did the evening trivia last night. Jimmy, James and a team of old people who knew all the answers but ahouted them for everyone else ended up winning. They were so proud. Our family becomes trivia fiends on these trips, but we are unfortunately missing today's trivia because we're exploring Germany.

My favorite part of the ship is the library. It's enormous. The only downside is that you don't actually get a view of the ocean :(

Anyway, I'm trying to write this while we are in the car to Berlin. Our actual stop was Wernemunde, which is three hours away from Berlin. We decided to rent cars and drive to Berlin. There are interesting things to see closer to the ship, but the consensus was that Berlin would be worth the trip. It is a very fascinating city.

Renting the car was an adventure. We rushed out of the main building at the port and stood around in the cold for like twenty minutes while Oppa and Chabba ran around Wernemunde looking for the place Chabba booked the cars at. Meanwhile, we watched the majority of our shipmates happily load up to the train that the chip chartered to Berlin. Umma eventually discovered that the car rental company's stand was in that first building. After making that enlightening discovery, we had to wait until Oppa and Chabba came back from wherever they were.

It's been a long car ride and I slept through most of it :-)  unfortunately I missed the point where Chabba was not driving at his usual slow pace and was taking advantage of the Autobahn. Hopefully we'll run into some place with WiFi so I can post this in Berlin. My priority, however, is to lead us through a fun tour of Berlin.