IGA Rostock and Stralsund

Once upon a time when I lived in Kiel, Germany, I had an invitation to join an excursion. It was organised by CDG (Carl Duisberg Gesselschaft) branch Schleswig Holstein where the city I lived located. Of course, as a normal practice when you were a scholarship receiver from CDG, you had to book your train ticket yourself and found the hotel where CDG has booked under your name by yourself also. The train ticket would be reimbursed once you got to the hotel. The rest is a history. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, entrance fee, guide, transportation to the tourism objects, everything was set-up by CDG. All the excursions CDG held usually free of charge, only a few trips that made you pay a little extra. Everything had been scheduled, all you had to do was executing the schedule, together with the other fellows joining that excursion. That would be pretty boring for a person who likes to find challenges while making a trip and I think I fall into that criteria.

So, to make the trip more rich in gaining experience, without spending too much Euro on it, I have to make some other journeys, inserting between the official one. The challenging thing when making a plan like this was to find out which cities I would love to stop-by. Also, I need to manage the time needed for exploring the stop-by city, in order not to miss the official schedule at the final destination.

After a short survey on the internet, I decided to stop-by at Rostock. The city held a big event at that time, called IGA Rostock. IGA stands for Internationale Gartenbauausstellung, it was a kind of exhibition on making garden and stuffs related to it. Since I am maniac with flowers and nature, speaking of garden exhibition would definitely made me interested. You can still see their website at http://www.iga-park-rostock.de/
Unfortunately, it comes only in German, no english translation at all. I am not sure whether the city hold this event anually or not. Of course the park where this exhibition was held is still there and functioned properly but as I have seen in their site, I don't think they hold this event ever again.

Okay, back to my story. I did the journey. I took the train at Kiel main railway station and headed to Rostock. Along the way, the scenery was beautiful, from  Schleswig-Holstein until Mecklenburg Vorpommern state. (I don't know why northern Germans like to have a long and difficult names for their states unlike the other states there).

Then, I reached Rostock. Since I did not have enough time, all I did was just going to the exhibition. I did not have the chance to have a sightseeing around Rostock.

The exhibition was nice and I enjoyed it. The flowers were many and a lot of stands from countries all around the world. I found mine which at that time it showed some traditional dances from Bali (of course), and from Aceh (Northen Sumatera, you know.... the one that had a bad faith, Tsunami, at the end of 2004). The dance they performed were Baris dance (Bali) and Saman dance (Aceh). Actually, I have never seen those two dances before so this is a golden opportunity for me seeing live performances.

It was a weirdest moment in my life, seeing my country's traditional dance in another land, far away from where it belongs. My nationalism suddenly burst out from the chest and I was really really proud when people were gathered around and gave a big applaus after the show finished. So, I asked the dancer team to take pictures with me. Wow, this is the first time I felt I am being proud of something while I did a travelling. :)

After having enough to see from IGA Rostock, I went to the next and final destination: Stralsund. I spent a night there and in the morning joined the group to ride a boat visiting Rügen.

Rügen is the biggest island Germany has, it is located in Baltic sea. According to the tour guide, this island is one of the most popular destination in Germany. We also went to Sellin, a seaside resort in Rügen. We went to several places as well but I already forgot their names. In short, I loved this trip, gave me another experience in exploring northern Germany.