Stralsund

Stralsund felt a little like a maze to me. Wandering around, I felt like there was something exciting somewhere, but I kept going down the wrong street and missing it. A lot of German people visit Stralsund on their summer vacations. It’s right on the water, and has a huge harbor, and outside of town there are lots of beaches and summer homes. The off-season was just beginning when I was there, so it was pretty quiet. In the hostel with me, were a bunch of schoolchildren on some kind of music retreat, so at night I could listen to them working their way though “Winter Wonderland” over and over. One night they even had a disco party in the lounge. Hostels here seem to be geared mainly to school groups on class trips, so most hostels I stayed in had at least one school group there, and the more popular places even more. At times, I felt like I was crashing someone’s summer camp.

The best part of Stralsund was the Meeresmuseum, a combination fishing/natural history museum and aquarium. They had all kinds of exhibits on fishing and marine life. My favorite part was the aquarium, where they had all kinds of crazy fish, like this Scorpionfish.

They also had little egg sacs where you could see tiny manta rays and sharks swimming around inside. At the bottom of the tank were newly hatched animals – both maybe three inches long. Next door, in a larger tank, were fully grown ones, the biggest ray maybe three feet long.