who went to Westerland auf Sylt.

On Friday morning, we met at the train station in Kiel to head to the Island of Sylt, a wisp of an island in the North Sea. It is thinly connected to the mainland of Schlieswig-Holstein by a dam, which we zipped across in the train. We sped through kilometers and kilometers of green fields of corn, yellow flowers, and of course, cow pastures. Atop a long bridge, I could see into matchbox gardens belonging to red-tiled houses, and with each minute, the sky got bigger.

I snapped at least ten photos that look a lot like this one. If you look really carefully, you can see the sea   up where the ground meets the sky. It was grey, but that seemed fitting; we passed through Husum, where Theodor Strom, the author and poet, lived. He wrote a poem about his hometown, which all Schlieswig-Holsteiners quote by heart, "Die Stadt." The last line of the poem is "die graue Stadt am Meer" ("the grey city on the see"). So we didn't mind the grayness a bit.

And that is a very good thing, because it is rainy in North Germany. The second day I was here, I got caught in a rainstorm on my way home from the bus stop. I was wet through in two seconds and hopped down our street on one foot, chasing my rubber ballet flat down the gutter. The rain is crazy this season, but as long as you don't mind getting a bit wet, it doesn't matter a bit. 

After we dropped our bags off at the hostel, we went to the aquarium in Westerland. Look who I saw there...Flotsam and Jetsam! They really looked like they were chatting creepily. I promise seeing Ursula's evil cronies was not the most momentous experience on this trip. 

Westerland though.... that's another story. It's a resort town. This balcony looked over the beech, where bratwurst (aha! This must be Germany!) stands ice cream stands lined the pier. Inside the white tents in the distance, a really strange band was playing Obladi Oblada (I thought of Josh!), except they somehow managed to make it sound like the Greek Festival. That's got to take some kind of talent. There was also an accordion player playing in the main street, who accompanied our ice cream stop at the local chocolate shop. (Incidentally... the chocolate isn't dangerous... but the ice cream and strawberries are!). We sat on a flower planter and ate vanilla ice cream with rote grütze (fruit compote) on top. The ice cream was wrapped up in freshly baked waffles that were smelled like cinnamon. The people watching was top notch, and the accordion music wrapped up the scene perfectly. It was a lucky, perfect Europe moment. Simon said he ordered it; even if he had, it couldn't have been better. Until, of course, this cute little boy stood over my shoulder, on the planter and said,"Hallo, entschuldigung!" (Hello, excuse me.)

"I walked all the way from there [pointing to the other side of the planter], and want to go all the way around. See how far I walked?" I hopped right up and asked if I could take a picture, and he posed for me most obligingly. That was unbeatably adorable. 

Not unlike this seagull. His name is Gustav.