By Svenja Illemann and Julia Warnatz – 26. 4. 2022
You must be wondering whether we found our cabins on the same day. Thanks to the support of people with Sonne experience, it wasn’t that difficult after all.
The decks are conveniently marked with different colours, so you can easily know where you are. The only difficulty is finding the right staircase and corridor (Julia can already do this quite well. Svenja still stubbornly walks into the wrong direction at first). Our berths are on the lowest deck, above the engines. We, as inexperienced students, learned from a crew member that this is the deck where people will have to row in case the engines stop working. Whether this is a joke or not remains to be seen, but in any case, there are hatches for the oars… The rooms are very spacious, with modern furnishings and have their own bathrooms with luxurious underfloor heating.
After moving into the rooms, we went on a little discovery tour through the ship. Spread over ten decks, there is a mess hall where food and drinks are available, a lounge with panoramic windows for playing games and socialising, a library with a large selection of various books, a sauna, a fitness room and, to our great delight, washing machines and dryers so that we didn’t have to pack five weeks’ worth of clothes. Not to mention the platform above the bridge for a beautiful view and of course a variety of labs, which we will get to know later.