Bremen

Well, I guess we can thank Ryanair for their cheap flights or none of this would've been possible. From Edinburgh we flew back to Dublin, slept that night in the airport, and flew to Bremen, Germany the following morning. Why? Well, I really wanted to go to Malta and that was the cheapest way. Ryanair can be great in that they have lots of flights all over Europe and if you book a couple weeks in advance at the right time of year, you can get a flight for 1 cent. Yep, 1 cent. They even pay most of the taxes. You still have to pay for your baggage (9 euro) and a check-in fee and a credit card booking fee, but it can still be really cheap. It cost us 23 euros each to fly to Bremen and 17 euros the following day to get to Malta. Not bad at all.
The catch was that we had to spend a night in Bremen. Sure, why not? We slept in the airport for a 2nd night in a row but it was actually a pretty comfortable and quiet one. Bremen claims to be the "city of trams" and there are a lot on a very good system. As we arrived at 2pm we took the tram into the old town to take a quick look around. The worst thing about Europe right now is that it gets dark too early so we had only a short time. Fortunately it is pretty small. It was really cold and windy too. Grrrr, or is it Brrr?
I was pleased to see that it has many people on bicycles and also has a huge section of the centre pedestrianized, two things I thought were really missing in Dublin. In keeping with the local style, many of the buildings were quite ornate and painted on the fronts around the main square. The town halls (new and old) and the statue in front are UNESCO sites but we didn't have time for much more than a quick peek into the cathedral. There was also another little section of narrow streets and shops that kind of looked like those little Christmas villages you can buy especially as the sun was setting and the shop window lights were beginning to stand out. Most of our time was spent in the airport trying to catch up on our journals though. I got so far behind in Ireland and Edinburgh because we were doing so much and talking so much in the evenings that there was never any time. I haven't picked up a novel to read in ages....
Ammon