At 9:30 in the morning, we glided into the port at Warnemunde, at the mouth of the Warne river, just downstream from the Hanseatic city of Rostock, and by 10 or so several hundred passengers had left the boat and got into buses.

Their plan? To take a three-hour bus ride to Berlin … and spend six hours there … and take a three-hour bus-ride back.

We have been to Berlin, and are glad to say we have, but it’s not the sort of place that lures us back. Not like Paris or London or Rome.

So we passed on the “72-hour bus ride” (as the ship’s cruise director mockingly described it, later, to those of us who had eschewed it).

After a suitable amount of indolence, and a visit to the capacious gym … we instead decided to walk around Warnemunde, a city of about 10,000.

It actually was charming. The first time I have set foot in Germany since 1993, if I recall correctly. And it did not involve three hours (twice) looking out the window of a bus.

Warnemunde is a tourist magnet. Mostly to east Germans, apparently. Because it has a beach (albeit a chilly Baltic beach) and boasts the amenities you find along the shore in northern/western Europe so that people can take advantage of their two-month summer. Hotels, spas, arcades, dozens of restaurants, ice cream stores, bars.

And a long strip of concrete for promenading, which isn’t really a German thing but could be. Not that the place was jumping, not in chilly mid-May, but it is ready for its close-up, whenever some warmth breaks out.

I always stop in churches and did here, too, at the Evangelische Kirche. Built in 1871, presumably roughed up in 1945, when the Russians visited, but patched with red brick and centrally placed.

This one had a few more interesting concepts than one would normally expect in a Lutheran church, in Germany, including a bizarre wooden altar decoration that dates from 1475 and apparently was made by a gentleman from Danzig. (Back then, a German town; now, the Polish city of Gdansk.)

Someone, back in the late 1400s, probably should have asked the guy what he intended, because it certainly isn’t clear. The altar decoration is a long (maybe 12 feet) wooden affair, about 30 inches high (perched on the actual altar), with two panels that fold out from the center panels, and include disciples and saints those of us in a modern age cannot identify. Carved out of wood. As the English-language church pamphlet notes: “The figures in the central panel are grouped in an odd way.”

The church also has a wooden statue (painted) of St. Christopher carrying, on his shoulders, the Christ child, who is maybe 18 months old. Yes. On his shoulders. I thought such familiarity with the divine would mean the adult male was Joseph, the husband of Mary, carrying Kid Jesus to Egypt, to escape Herod. But, no. it was St. Kit, the guy who used to appear on the dashboards of many an American car.

Anyway, a sort of memorable place, in a strange way.

The center of the town is tidy and well-kept, which reminded me of the oft-repeated trivia that American troops in Europe during World War II found that German towns most reminded them of the States.

By now, the sun (!) was out, and the wind only semi-powerful, and we ambled over to the beach, and I did my “walk to the edge of the large body of water and touch it” thing … which I have been doing for 40 years. The Baltic is cold. Quite.

We passed along the main frontage of “places important during those few weeks warm enough to attract Germans from the interior to the sea”, and stopped at one, a sort of cake and ice cream shop, where we hoped we could get wifi. Well, no, actually. But we did get cold and hot chocolate, and listened in, as best I could, to some “typisch Deutsch” conversations. (Also, quite a few people spoke some English, which we had been told not to expect, so my decaying German was nearly useless in a practical as well as theoretical sense.)

We bought a weird lunch-time concoction named a “stromer” which was a round piece of farmer’s bread in which cheese and potato bits had been wound. For 2.5 euros. Kinda weird. Very starchy. And cold.

I asked the woman in the kiosk for the name of one particular type of the sandwich-y thing, and she said, “Stromer!” as if any idiot knew that. What I was asking was “Yes, but what is in that one, as opposed to the others?”

Most everyone else was friendly, and not paying much attention to the visitors, who no doubt were shedding money on T-shirts and tchotchkes, and so were welcome, given that we would be gone by midnight. But, in the large scheme, make up only a fraction of their eventual tourist income.

Even with hundreds of people from the Constellation walking about, the place was still mostly Germans doing German things in Germany, and it seemed at least as useful and instructional as the 72-hour bus ride to Berlin.