After escaping trolls in Norway, the final stop on Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly’s trip to Northern Europe is Kiel, a city in Germany on the Baltic Sea.
Languages are fun! All of the countries that Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly visited spoke different languages. In Norway, people speak Norwegian. In Denmark, people speak Danish. In Germany, people speak German.
Luckily for Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly, most of the people in this part of the world can also speak English, so they were able to communicate with other people easily. However, Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly saw lots of signs around their journey that looked funny because they were in a foreign language.
Their first stop in Kiel was at a museum dedicated to the history of cruise ships. People have been going on large cruise ships for vacation for a quite a long time. The cruise ships have changed a lot but the destinations are mostly the same. There were lots of old posters and advertisements from over 100 years ago!
After seeing the first posters in the museum, Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly had to ask themselves an important question:
What the heck is a fahrt?
Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly remembered that Aunt Davia and Uncle Rich told them how to use the internet to look up words. If you go to translate.google.com, you can put in any word from any language, and it will translate it into English.
After using Google Translate, Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly learned that “fahrt” means “journey.” This meant that “Polarfahrt” meant “Polar Journey,” or in other words, a journey to the North Pole!
Likewise, a “Norwegen-Fahrt” is a Norwegian Journey, or a trip to Norway. This means that Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly have already been on a Norwegen-Fahrt since they just visited Norway!
Languages are funny. Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly were curious, so they looked up other translations they had seen. They remembered that when they were in a Taxi in Denmark, they saw the word “fart” in front of the driver on the dashboard of the car. They looked it up, and it turns out that the Danish word “fart” means “speed” in English. Oh, that makes sense! People who are driving cars need to know how fast they are driving — they need to know their speed. In Denmark, drivers need to know their fart.
Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly’s next stop was at a different museum about all kinds ships, not just cruise ships.
This museum had actual boats in it!
Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly could hardly believe that this old rowboat was 300 years old! They wondered if they could sneak it out of the museum and see if it still floats, but then they figured they had gotten into enough trouble on this vacation and decided it was not a good idea.
Maybe the most interesting exhibit in the museum was the Seehund submarine. “Seehund” means “seal” in English, and these were some of the first submarines that were ever used. A submarine is a boat that goes completely underwater! They were so small that only two people could fit inside of one.
The submarine in the museum had sunk and was on the ocean floor for decades before it was recovered. Much of it had rusted away during that time.
Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly were sad that this was their last day of vacation. They had so much fun and saw so many interesting things! The good news is that they were already coming up with plans to sneak into Aunt Davia and Uncle Rich’s luggage again because they overheard that they had plans to go on another cruise in December right before Christmas 🎅
Thanks for reading about the adventures of Flat Bobby and Flat Nelly in Northern Europe! Look for more posts later this year!
Until next time!
Round Bobby and Nelly had many giggles during the reading of this page. Looking forward to more adventures!