Schwerin; Sunday, 29 July, 2012

In the end, at about 4am after failing to get any sleep I decided I had to give up and open the window and accept that sleep would be accompanied by bites.

Thankfully, I managed to get a couple of hours of restless sleep, and, possibly because of my slaughter of the previous night, the mosquitos had avoided me.

After breakfast, at which it was obvious most people in the hotel had not had good nights’ sleep – everyone looked tired and over-hot, I packed my bag, left it in reception and went into town for a couple of hours before I had to catch my train.

First stop of the morning was the art museum close to the hotel. After looking around that I wandered up through town to the Schelfmark area of the city, formerly its own small town before it was swallowed up by an expanding city, and had a look around there, then headed back to the centre of town, diving into the tourist office to avoid a sudden shower.

It was there that I found a flyer for the TV tower, which had a viewing platform open for visits. As I had nearly two hours to kill before my train I caught a tram out to the stop advertised on the flyer and then walked the short distance to the tower.

I took in the views, which very quickly started to disappear into thick, heavy clouds, and very soon it was obvious that the short shower earlier had just been a taster. Soon it was absolutely chucking it down and it was clear I was going to get wet.

I waited in the entrance hall of the TV tower hoping for the rain to stop, but in the end, knowing I had to pick up my luggage and get to the station for a train in a little over an hour, I had to make a very soggy walk back to the tram stop (which felt much longer than the walk in the dry in the opposite direction had felt). I got back into town, quickly ran to the hotel to pick up my luggage and use their toilets to change to into a dry T-shirt and put a hooded top on, before braving the elements again to head to the station and my train onto Magdeburg.