The Cruise Story

Here in the Frankfurt area....over the past week....we've had this comical news piece going on, with social media action on maximum 'blitz'.

So to tell this story....there's this group of kids who will be wrapping up a study phase.  They've got this plan building up... a five-day cruise-study trip from Kiel, Germany to Copenhagen, and ending in Oslo. 

The cruise in this particular case....isn't really cheap, but it's in the non-season period, and with only five days....it's reasonably cheap as cruises go. 

When this announcement came out around two weeks ago, it basically got hyped-up by the anti-climate agenda folks in Frankfurt, and a vast amount of criticism was leveled against the teachers who agreed on the school agenda, and the students for agreeing to the cruise. 

You can bring this up within Frankfurt, and most teens all have some opinion....either it's charged-up on climate change, or that the students have the right to take a cruise that relates to their class studies. 

Little has been said about their studies but whatever has appeared....suggest that international relations and travel studies are involved.  Could you have done this by bus instead of cruise-ship?  To some degree.  You'd drive from Frankfurt to Copenhagen....roughly a 10-to-12 hour bus-ride.  From Copenhagen to Oslo, it's a seven-hour ride.  Then returning back to Frankfurt?  You'd be talking about sixteen to twenty hours on a bus....depending on stau's. 

Twenty years ago, you could have arranged this trip, and less than 500 people in the region would have known about it.  Right now....probably over 150,000 people are aware of this group, their class trip, and have offered up some type of criticism (mostly that cruises are bad for the environment).  Social media changed that landscape.

My German wife brought up this fact....that from the early 1970s to the late 1980s....here in the Frankfurt region, it was kinda common that a school group nearing graduation, would get this school trip of a week....airfare as part of the deal....to fly from Frankfurt to West Berlin (still in the old divided Germany days), and the class agenda was to grasp negativity of communist-living by spending a day over in East Berlin.  As she described the experience, you got enough of a dose that you never wanted to live in that lifestyle. 

I don't have much of an opinion over the cruise...whether it's wise or not.  As for the criticism and social media angle.....I just find it amusing that this many people (a lot of them kids) are angry and frustrated over the trip.  Maybe the government should make a rule that you can only hike to your destination for the class-trip....carrying a backpack, and observe German birds, nature, and sip cola around the campfire at night.