annichan
There's a platypus controlling me, he's underneath
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2008
- Messages
- 1,216
Hello everybody,
DH and I had the opportunity to go to Papenburg this weekend and do a group tour of the Meyer Werft shipyard, which means we were able to pay a visit to the Disney Dream which is currently under construction there.
I would like to share that experience with you, along with some pictures I took. Please keep in mind that I have never cruised before - we will be doing our first ever cruise on the Magic in three weeks' time
cool1
and I don't know much at all about engineering and such, so I will mostly let the pictures speak for themselves and not go into too much technical detail since I would most probably get that wrong anyway 
.
So, to get started:
About 30 miles inland from the North Sea, on the River Ems in Northwestern Germany and not far from the Dutch border, lies the little town of Papenburg.
It started out in the 1700s as a peat-cutting village because there was nothing but moor and fenland all around, but pretty soon a shipbuilding industry was established there, and by the 1900s Papenburg-built ships were already sailing the oceans far and wide from Europe to the Americas and even to Australia.
There used to be about 20 shipyards in town, but only one of them (I think) survived: The Meyer Werft ("Werft" being German for shipyard), which always has been and still is run by members of the Meyer family (for the sixth generation now, covering more than 200 years):
It is possible (and not really expensive at about 12 dollars per adult) to book a guided tour of the facilities of this huge shipyard, and we were told that about a thousand visitors actually come to see the shipyard every day
.
So we booked the tour and got on the bus, where we were already informed that Meyer Werft was currently building the biggest cruise ship ever built in Germany, but we weren't told yet which it was (I knew, though
).
Disney Cruise Lines is not commonly known at all in Germany, even an acquaintance of mine who is a travel agent and personally interested in cruising the Caribbean had never even heard of DCL. So most people seemed to be on the tour not because of the Dream, but either out of general interest in ships or because at the same time in its second and slightly smaller construction hall, Meyer Werft is building the AIDAsol, which is the new ship in the very popular German AIDA cruise line.
This picture of the tour bus parked at the Werft gives an idea of how huge the halls actually are:
And here you can see the many visitors meandering along the exterior walkways:
Actually, it was not entirely unlike Disney World, with a fair amount of qeueing and waiting in line involved, to get on and off the bus, to get through the first and then the second set of doors, to get to the movie theatre and to the next parts of the exhibition
.
Our tour guide kept it interesting, though, by telling us stories about some former ships that the Meyer Werft built, like the one that was the inspiration for the Humphrey Bogart movie "African Queen".
First we were led through one of the exterior corridors:
It had been raining so there was a rainbow in the sky and I took this picture of it:
A moment later I realized that the rainbow was not all I had been photographing, because the tour guide told us that that was actually the Dream's radio tower sitting there on the dock!
We were then shown a short movie on the history of shipbuilding at the Meyer Werft and then led through several exhibition rooms pertaining to the shipyard history. I didn't really take any pictures here - until, of course, I spotted this:
The entrance to the DCL exhibition!
It was actually quite weird to see this exhibition in German language (and it truly was all German, not the tiniest English subtitle to be seen anywhere which I found rather impractical for international visitors - surely there must be some?). Normally, DCL does not cater to the German market at all with their marketing, there are no adverts to be seen for DCL here ever, and it is not possibile to order the cruise DVD here in Germany either (or indeed anywhere in Europe, if I am not mistaken?).
Inside the entrance, there was a big picture of Walt with the quote "You can dream, design and build the most wonderful place in the earth, but it takes people to make the dream come true" (sorry for the vague translation back from German, I don't know the original quote).
They didn't send Walt to Germany all on his own, though - Captain Donald was with him:
They also had several walls full of info pictures on DCL and its ports of call (meanwhile, the tour guide told us that there are fireworks on Disney ships EVERY DAY, which was new to me).
To be continued ...
DH and I had the opportunity to go to Papenburg this weekend and do a group tour of the Meyer Werft shipyard, which means we were able to pay a visit to the Disney Dream which is currently under construction there.
I would like to share that experience with you, along with some pictures I took. Please keep in mind that I have never cruised before - we will be doing our first ever cruise on the Magic in three weeks' time
cool1 and I don't know much at all about engineering and such, so I will mostly let the pictures speak for themselves and not go into too much technical detail since I would most probably get that wrong anyway .So, to get started:
About 30 miles inland from the North Sea, on the River Ems in Northwestern Germany and not far from the Dutch border, lies the little town of Papenburg.
It started out in the 1700s as a peat-cutting village because there was nothing but moor and fenland all around, but pretty soon a shipbuilding industry was established there, and by the 1900s Papenburg-built ships were already sailing the oceans far and wide from Europe to the Americas and even to Australia.
There used to be about 20 shipyards in town, but only one of them (I think) survived: The Meyer Werft ("Werft" being German for shipyard), which always has been and still is run by members of the Meyer family (for the sixth generation now, covering more than 200 years):
It is possible (and not really expensive at about 12 dollars per adult) to book a guided tour of the facilities of this huge shipyard, and we were told that about a thousand visitors actually come to see the shipyard every day
.So we booked the tour and got on the bus, where we were already informed that Meyer Werft was currently building the biggest cruise ship ever built in Germany, but we weren't told yet which it was (I knew, though
). Disney Cruise Lines is not commonly known at all in Germany, even an acquaintance of mine who is a travel agent and personally interested in cruising the Caribbean had never even heard of DCL. So most people seemed to be on the tour not because of the Dream, but either out of general interest in ships or because at the same time in its second and slightly smaller construction hall, Meyer Werft is building the AIDAsol, which is the new ship in the very popular German AIDA cruise line.
This picture of the tour bus parked at the Werft gives an idea of how huge the halls actually are:
And here you can see the many visitors meandering along the exterior walkways:
Actually, it was not entirely unlike Disney World, with a fair amount of qeueing and waiting in line involved, to get on and off the bus, to get through the first and then the second set of doors, to get to the movie theatre and to the next parts of the exhibition
.Our tour guide kept it interesting, though, by telling us stories about some former ships that the Meyer Werft built, like the one that was the inspiration for the Humphrey Bogart movie "African Queen".
First we were led through one of the exterior corridors:
It had been raining so there was a rainbow in the sky and I took this picture of it:
A moment later I realized that the rainbow was not all I had been photographing, because the tour guide told us that that was actually the Dream's radio tower sitting there on the dock!
We were then shown a short movie on the history of shipbuilding at the Meyer Werft and then led through several exhibition rooms pertaining to the shipyard history. I didn't really take any pictures here - until, of course, I spotted this:
The entrance to the DCL exhibition!
It was actually quite weird to see this exhibition in German language (and it truly was all German, not the tiniest English subtitle to be seen anywhere which I found rather impractical for international visitors - surely there must be some?). Normally, DCL does not cater to the German market at all with their marketing, there are no adverts to be seen for DCL here ever, and it is not possibile to order the cruise DVD here in Germany either (or indeed anywhere in Europe, if I am not mistaken?).
Inside the entrance, there was a big picture of Walt with the quote "You can dream, design and build the most wonderful place in the earth, but it takes people to make the dream come true" (sorry for the vague translation back from German, I don't know the original quote).
They didn't send Walt to Germany all on his own, though - Captain Donald was with him:
They also had several walls full of info pictures on DCL and its ports of call (meanwhile, the tour guide told us that there are fireworks on Disney ships EVERY DAY, which was new to me
).
To be continued ...
) - but it was complete with a virtual porthole! (Sorry for the bad picture, I didn't notice that my flash was visible in the porthole.)
. So, I shall mostly let them speak for themselves:
Cannot wait!!
.
