We started the morning with a short run of errands (still windy and still unseasonably chilly at 48 degrees) and delivered fresh rolls and croissants to Imke, Uschi and Wolfgang in the other apartment before having our own breakfast in ours. We then basically stayed put, puttering on our computers and staying inside watching the bay with a lot of sailboats and the occasional cruise liner or container ship coming or going. Imke and Uschi came by to have coffee with us around 10 am and chat (lots of catching up for Uschi and me, who hadn’t seen each other for 2 years), and the skies kept getting lighter, so we decided to venture out at lunch time for a restaurant meal at a Chinese restaurant–Imke, Uschi, Wolfgang, Mark and me (Kai was being a teenager again and stayed home). The lunch was a long time coming (partly because the restaurant was wrestling with a rather large 90th-birthday party) but it was really delicious, and we had a huge “lazy Susan”-style round table, so we all tried each other’s food and made a really wonderful mess. By about 2:30, we went back to the apartment, rounded up Kai, and went to tour the WWII submarine that is on exhibit here. That was really fascinating, especially since we had very recently seen the movie “Das Boot,” set in 1941 during the peak of the German submarine war, and this submarine, although built slightly later, is very similar to the U-boat in the movie. Then we walked a bit past the exhibit site and were in for a surprise. This is the area where people are allowed to wind- and kitesurf, and there were about a dozen people kitesurfing in the rather strong winds (and in wet suits of course, given that it was still in the 40s and not at all nice). But it turned out that in this kind of wind, the kites will actually lift the surfers up into the sky for short periods of time, so we saw people flying through the air! It was awesome. Mark even captured some of it in photos and videos.
Kai had about enough of the cold by then and wanted to go back to his beloved computer, so we dropped him off and walked back to the beach and to a very cosy restaurant / cafe right on the beach for coffee, hot chocolate and cherry streusel cake to share. We were looking out at the water but from a nice, warm spot, so it was lovely. We did some grocery shopping on the way back, and also picked up a couple of fabulous little shopping bags that fold into a teeny 1×2-inch “pillow” and can be taken pretty much everywhere. Around 6:00, we went back to the apartment for a bit to rest a little, and by about 7 pm the sun had actually come out and we saw the bay with blue skies and sunshine for the first time! We had dinner with Imke, Uschi, and Wolfgang in their apartment–another lovely soup along with the standard evening meal of bread and cheese. Since it’s strawberry season and there’s German-grown strawberries on sale everywhere, we feasted on those for dessert. Imke and Uschi joined us for a stroll along the beach, and we watched the sun set over the other side of the bay again. While Mark processed the photo yield for the day, I took a nice hot bath, since there is a really nice bathtub in our apartment, and we called it a day around 11:00–a very nice day indeed!