Hamburg

 Sorry for the blog hiatus, I've been busy re-acquainting myself with the States and spending time with my family and dear friends.  Now, my Aunt Holly and Uncle Ed have kindly offered their lake house so while my Mom is playing fetch with Jasper (Holly's dog, who I'm dogsitting) I'm going to see what kind of catch up I can do.  The good news is that I've already written out my Hamburg memories so I don't have to wait for the coffee to kick in.

This is a bike powered bar, all of these men are enjoying a delicious German beer as they pedal through the streets.

On our last afternoon in Amsterdam Kathleen and I realized we did not have a place to stay in Hamburg. We had been relying on a positive response from couchsurfing messages Kathleen sent but with no responses we decided it was time to book a hostel.  Moving from Amsterdam to Hamburg we realized we were getting deeper and deeper into an incomprehensible language and a culture we knew less about than previously thought.  Both of the trains we took were chaotic and confusing and once in Hamburg we spent an hour and a half looking for our hostel that was 600 meters in the direction that we had already been in.   When we stopped to ask a bus driver where exactly we were trying to go he used his very broken English to guide us even further into our confusion and when he had decided that his directions sufficed he raised his hand shouting “Ready...” and dropped his hands as he said “GO”. So off we went dying of laughter after having been dismissed in such a way only to get turned around again to land in our second hotel lobby to be sent in the right way to find our home for the night, at last.  Once there we still had some planning to do for we didn’t have a place or an idea of where we wanted to stay the next night.  After our “where is the hostel?” tour we realized that Hamburg might not be where we want to spend the majority of our time and for that matter that one night would probably be enough. 

By the lake in Hamburg on our way to the museum

The following morning Kathleen and I proved our develop(ed)ing European habits by sitting at the hostel breakfast table for two hours drinking cup after cup of coffee not caring about what we had to get done that day.  Once we set out we needed to get our logistical things done, which is the single bad part about traveling with no real plan or direction. So we booked our hostel for Berlin that night and found the bus station to buy our tickets to leave that evening then we could go tour around.  We had done some research on Hamburg and found a few things we were both interested in, one of them being a wonderful art museum that turned out to be one of the highlights of our trip.  This museum whose name has escaped me,, had everything.  We walked in the first room looking at art from the 17^th century Germany moved on to 16^th century religious triptychs and at the end we were in front of French Impressionism.  As we went to exit we ran into a special exhibit, which I’ve learned anything from going to the High with my Grandmother Nama it’s that no matter how “museumed out “you are it is ALWAYS worth it to check out the special exhibit that’s generally downstairs.  This time proved me right, we got to enjoy a photography exhibit that relied heavily on repetition.  While it wasn’t my favorite photography exhibit it was certainly worth the extra 20 minutes in the museum and away from our lunch. 

The port

Once out of the museum we followed our nose’s and walked into a lovely little Thai restaurant where I got tofu, such a treat! Gastronomically speaking Germany is nothing like France.  There are a lot of different ethnic foods, Turkish, Mexican, Chinese, Thai and each one of them had multiple well documented vegetarian option (as in they have the green leaf next to its description). It was because of this delicious food that I ate too much of, that each afternoon I was complaining to Kathleen that my stomach hurt, but each lunch and dinner meal I continued to “hurt” myself. When will I learn?  From lunch we walked over to one of the main squares where the focal point was it’s “Hotel de Ville” or “city hall” naturally I have forgotten the word for this in German, but I’m not feeling like it’s even worth looking into.  We kept going with our eye on the clock towards a beautiful bell tower made in memory of the holocaust and it’s victims and from there we saw the port.  Did you know that Hamburg’s is one of the largest ports in the Europe? From there we ran to the bus station to take our three-hour bus ride to Berlin.  

The city hall place

city hall place from behind

*All Pictures are thanks to Kathleen.