Baltic Cruise II

From St Petersburg we sailed back west, visiting Helsinki, Finland; Stockholm, Sweden; Rostock (Wismar tour) and Kiel, Germany.

Helsinki has much fancy modern architecture, contrasted by the offbeat tourist draw called the Church in the Rock.

Fascinating Ceiling

Stockholm features the Vasa Museum, containing a ship resurrected from the harbor 333 years after it foundered and sank on its maiden voyage in 1628.  Swedish engineering has vastly improved since.

Stockholm Harbor

From Rostock, Germany we took a short excursion to the medieval town of Wismar, where we learned a lot about the early history of brewing beer.  Beer was health food actually -- for all ages -- as the water was not safe to drink unless made into beer.

They love these pig sculptures

According to our guide the mayor in the olden days would issue a proclamation like, 'Dear Townspeople, on Wednesday please do not shit or piss in the canal, as we'll be brewing beer from that water on Thursday.  Thank you.'  Or some such.

So we went to a brewery, in business since 1452 and had a pint.

The tour included a walk around a church still not entirely reconstructed from WWII.

The tour guide lamented the fact that, in her opinion, Allied bombing of the church in the last days of the war was an "entirely unnecessary" act.  I did not offer my opinion that there had already been by that time six million unnecessary acts committed by Germans.

Next day we docked in Kiel, Germany.  Not much to report from there.

What?

 Then we were back to Copenhagen for more adventures.