Parthemores in Poland

So we just returned from our awesome two week cruise to Norway.  And now we face the difficult reality of not only completing the blog, but not eating 27 times a day, and actually making our own bed.  I’m still waiting for someone to bring me my afternoon snack of crab claws or jumbo shrimp…

The cruise departed and returned to Copenhagen, so it made sense to drive there.  On the way through Germany, we stopped in Schwerin to see the castle.  And so began the saga of the next two days:  parking.

After parking in the very last spot in the garage (no kidding, they wouldn’t let us in until someone else left), we braved the rain and visited the castle.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t take photos inside.  But the most impressive room was the throne room (photo from the Wikipedia page). 

Our next stop was our hotel in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck.  We were hoping that our hotel would have a parking lot.  But of course not.

There were signs all over the place that pointed to available parking.  However, most of them were directing us to places we could park on the street.  OK, no problem.  Following an obvious sign, we drove down a super narrow cobblestone street, to find only three spots, all of which were full.  And, of course, the street is a dead end.  This repeated itself several more times with the same result, me completing not a three-point turn but a multiple there of.

After finding a parking garage (yay!) we walked around the city a bit and bought some of their famous marzipan.  The old town is filled with neat brick gothic buildings, to include the slightly-leaning-over main gate.

We ate dinner and enjoyed some German beer in a restaurant decorated with the city crests of all the Hanseatic cities, a couple of which are in Poland (Gdańsk and Szczecin).

The next morning it was on to Copenhagen, via the ferry from Puttgarden to Rødby.  Nothing too exciting there, except when I passed by the newsstand.  I saw two different Danish newspapers, with the exact same photo and the exact same gigantic headline:  “MICHAEL JACKSON DØD.” 

Does that mean dead?  Holy cow!  We thought so, but we had no way to know for sure, and didn’t find out until at least three days later.

Onward to Copenhagen.  We had two tasks:  1.  Find a place to park and 2.  get ourselves and all our luggage on the boat.

I did some research on this beforehand, and found that the rates for parking at the port were astronomical.  Luckily, the street parking adjacent to the port was in the cheapest zone.  But since you can’t feed the meter for two weeks straight, we had to go buy a pass from the “Center for Parkering.”  (That’s not a typo – in Danish, it’s parkering.)

Let me digress and quickly say that Copenhagenis absolutely the craziest city I have ever driven in (remember, Eric has a broken arm, so I am doing all the driving at this point).  As we are looking for our parkering, we see a large truck (an old-school deuce-and-a-half in fact) full of students, dressed up in crazy outfits, drinking beer, screaming and honking.  This truck then pulls out and follows us.  There is nothing more unnerving than driving in a new city and hearing nothing but honking and screaming. 

In addition to crazy drunken Danes in old army trucks, I should also mention the bikers.  They are everywhere and the city encouraged this by installing bike lanes complete with their own traffic lights.  I think this was done at the expense of the car lanes, since some of them just seemed to end randomly.  Driving in Copenhagen is like trying to drive in the middle of the Tour de France. 

Finally we park the car in accordance with their 7,000 different parking rules and find our ship.  Driving in Copenhagen was completely frustrating, but it was all worth it when I heard the words “would you care for a glass of champagne?” 

Ahhh…much better.