Hamburg Happened

Back in Berlin and feelin’ fine! It’s going on 6 o’clock here, and having napped, ran, and supped on English Breakfast (Beans on toast—“English Breakfast” is my poor lazy vegan friend Josh’s term, which I use because it sounds about 40% classier than “beans on toast”) since my train got in at around 2, I’m feeling fortified enough to wade through my database of electronic visual memories (“digital photographs”) and start documenting my eventful trip to the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.

I didn’t even have to leave Berlin to catch my first Sehenswürdigkeit (literally, “thing worth seeing”): the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (main train station). It is a massive, modern structure, very airy and full of light despite the thousands of tons of metal that whip through it every day. Natural light was obviously a priority for the designers, and I must say they were very successful—even two floors below ground level, I could see the sky.

Being a natural worrywort, especially when it comes to travel, I arrived at the station an hour early and had a little time to kill. The detailed miniature of the Hauptbahnhof was cool, but reflection off its glass casing messed up most of my pictures. The exception was this tiny plastic dude in a yellow convertible feeling the tiny plastic breeze blow through his tiny plastic hair:
Part of my ongoing series of hand portraits. This one is called, “Hands Are Like Johnny Cash—They Only Exist To Let You Know That You’re Dyin.”Fun with German engineering: this whole country is lousy with clever mechanisms. Check out the front door design on the Hauptbahnhof, for example. During rush hours, this door is clearly designed to function as one of those constantly rotating, extra-huge revolving doors that can handle vast amounts of foot traffic:But during slow periods—say, mid-morning on a weekday—they stop chewing up all that energy to keep the door spinning and switch over to normal sliding door mode:
Eventually I had to stop geeking out over tricky device design and actually get on a train. I got exactly what I asked for: a window seat, in a compartment, in a Ruhebereich, which means Quiet Zone, which means nobody yammering on his/her cell phone right next to me the whole trip. My compartment companions turned out to be a woman named Tanja and her mile-a-minute 4-year-old son Paulo, on their way home to Hamburg from a visit to grandma in Berlin. Over the course of the 90-minute journey, Tanja and I had a long conversation auf Deutsch about American culture (she had a hard time fathoming Conceal & Carry) while Paulo played with an awesome truck he got from his grandma and pretended to be cat. Paulo was v entertaining, blond, a little shy at first—basically a German version of my adorable little cousin Callum in London.

Exactly on time and very smoothly we rolled out of the city and I got my first look at Germany outside of Berlin. The countryside between Berlin and Hamburg was obviously less dense than the cities themselves, but as you might expect in such a brief span between two big metropolitan areas—and in a country with 80 million people in a space the size of Montana—things never really got properly rural. I did, however, get to see some Minnesota-ish things that I have been missing in the big city, such as pine woods, cows, and a couple of deer. Once again, stupid shiny glass precluded photography.

When we hit the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof I bid adieu to Tanja and Paulo and disembarked into the Free and Hanseatic city on the Elbe.
Now, when I booked this hostel, I chose it for its central location and vicinity to both the harbor and the Beatles memorial. Extremely minimal research would have revealed that this area, the Reeperbahn, is the most notorious red light district/sex club strip in Western Europe. I caught on pretty quickly when I walked past 4 strip clubs, each one covered in bizarre airbrushed nudes, on the half block between the train station and my hostel. You can see a couple of these weird, cartoon ladies behind this burnt-out lesbian waiting to cross the street.I also walked by an insane weapons shop. I like the question mark price tag on the lower rightmost gun.Also the baseball bat/ski mask juxtaposition:Decisions, decisions…As it was, I got a good deal for a great location, and the whole place was more “hilarious sleazy” than “scary sleazy.”The door to my cozy little room, for example, had obviously been broken open and hastily repaired at some point in the past, and the handsoap in the bathroom was “Tricky Ricky” brand. Hilarious!
After a quick nap on my narrow bed I headed off into the city. This first walk established two excellent themes that stuck with me for my entire Hamburg jaunt: beautiful weather despite inclement forecasts, and cool things unexpectedly stumbled upon. I walked in full sun to the harbor—the cultural and economic core of Hamburg has always been its massive port, the second largest in Europe and ninth largest worldwide—and noticed a stream of foot and bicycle traffic disappearing into this domed structure.Here’s what that dome looks like from underneath:I know what you’re thinking: that building didn’t look so tall from the outside. Well you got that much right, Jack, but what you didn’t count on was the fact that this building is the entrance to an old tunnel beneath the harbor. See?It was mostly peds and bicyclists, but there were also big car-sized elevators (for cars) and a single lane of auto traffic down the middle heading towards the north bank. I talked to one of the elevator operators/tunnel traffic cops and learned that tunnel traffic runs south in the morning (from the densely residential north bank to the densely industrial south bank) and back north in the afternoon to accommodate all the people driving home from work.
All of this added up to me being on the wrong side of the river for tourism—there weren’t any big ships coming in and the harbor yards were fenced off. I walked back through the tunnel pretty quickly, though I did take the opportunity to photograph the pretty, tourist-friendly north bank from across the river,And utilize one of these satellite toilets.The Port-A-Johns were basically identical to the American models. Another USA nostalgia trigger: this closed-up hot dog stand. Oooooh say can you seeeeee….After my long walk under the river and back, I got a little pre-dinner fortification in the form of my first beer in Hamburg/first German beer from a can/first tallboy on this side of the Atlantic. Also my first beer in Germany that didn’t taste great—I can see why glass is so ubiquitous here.

Say, what’s that towering in the distance?
It couldn’t be an incredibly massive statue of Otto von Bismark, could it?It is! It is an incredibly massive statue of Otto von Bismark!As you can tell, the big stone Otto caught my photographic attention. I don’t know if it was the visible layers of granite blocks (which I thought added to Ots’ monumental, building-type quality) or the prominence of the sword (“Guys I have a great idea so we’re gonna build another glorious statue of a guy with a weapon” “Oh terrific we don’t have enough of those and weapons never cause any problems especially in Germany”) but I have more photos of this thing than I have of my dogs. Okay, that’s not true, but I still made a lot of pictures of O von B. I think I’m finally slipping into that terrible, efficient digital photographer mindset of “why not take another one.”

Parting shot: Otto wonders how hard it would be to cut the sun in half.
I headed back to the harbor to watch the sun go down over the water. I swear to God this camera was designed for photographing sunsets.This building is either on fire or very very holy.While waiting for the good-for-nothing sun to hurry up and set I made a couple phone calls and discovered that the other people I knew who I thought were going to be in Hamburg decided not to come to Hamburg after all. So, free of all human connection, I commenced wandering moth-style towards the brightest light I could see.

What is that revolving ring of fire on the horizon?This blurred, crappy photo shows you why I take so few pictures in low-light situations. Luckily my situation got less low-light in a hurry, as that mysterious ring was in fact a Ferris wheel (German: Riesenrad, literally “giant wheel”) and said Ferris wheel was in fact the centerpiece of a huge carnival. Awesome!Animatronic Salvador Dali! Radical!Airwolf! Extreme!Some dopey, doe-eyed airbrush Beatles! Tubular!
Terrifying corn-man! Terrified clown! Bowser! OUT OF CONTROL!
The full moon looked very small and was easy to miss among the glow.
Next morning kicked off with a brief walking tour of St. Pauli, the cool little neighborhood that is there to discover for anyone willing to get 100 meters away from the stupid tourist crap on the Reeperbahn.

Cool van,
Cool grafitti,
Cool little record shop (not pictured) with this cool poster. I would have bought this but it cost 20 Euros, and as Hamburg’s public posters proved to be considerably easier to remove than Berlin’s I got accustomed to obtaining neat posters for free. GIFTS ALL AROUND.

I ventured back into Reeperbahn territory once more in pursuit of Beatles stuff. This inflatable yellow submarine made me suspect I was on the right track.Hey, it’s Max, and he’s next to the Star Club memorial!The Star Club was a Hamburg venue where many of the great bands of the 60s and 70s—including, of course, the Beatles—played early in their careers. The club burned down in the 1969 and a few years later they put up this commemorative rock.

Now what you may notice that is unusual in this photo is that I, your humble blogger, am in it. No, I did not use a tripod and a timer, nor did I use telekinesis, nor did I happen to meet my exact double and ask him to pose. I simply asked an older gentleman to take my picture.

I asked auf Deutsch, and his immediate response was “You are American?” I owned up to it, and he told me (in perfect English—always embarrassing) that his name was John, that he was from Norway, and that he had brought his sons Paul and Anders to Hamburg to show them around his old haunts. John, in his 60s, had been a sailor in his youth, and he’d had a couple days in Hamburg in ’62. He was sitting in a tea shop when a group of poor young Englishmen came in and started begging around for a cup of tea—they’d already spent every penny getting to Germany, and they didn’t get paid until after the night’s show. John bought them a cup of tea and learned that they were in a BAND called the BEATLES and they INVITED HIM TO THE SHOW and he went and HUNG OUT BACKSTAGE. COOL.

I realize he could have been making this all up, but he was with his kids, which leads me to believe that the story was true, unless if it is a Norwegian tradition to mislead other tourists while on vacation. That wouldn’t be a bad tradition.

Down the street was a cool Beatles memorial that I asked a guy who probably hadn’t met the Beatles (I didn’t ask) to photograph me in front of. The outline on the far right is Stuart Sutcliffe, the gifted painter/not-so-great bassist who played with the Beatles in Hamburg and died a couple years later. I found a plaque that tried to cast Stu as the “Hamburg Beatle,” which didn’t seem terribly fair.

Poor ol’ Stu.Generally speaking, I was surprised by how little Beatles stuff I found in Hamburg. Outside of this Beatles Platz thing, one cheesy, overpriced “museum” that I didn’t bother with, and those glam portraits at the carnival, I didn’t find much mention of the Fab Four. Not one Beatles postcard for sale, for example. It seems to me that there’s more money to be made here, but then I am real fond of the Beatles.

On my way to Hamburg’s big, famous, very church-like Rathouse (town hall) I found this little Denkmal (memorial) scrawled on a bridge across the river. It reads, “My beloved longboard died on this spot!” I spent quite a while working out the funniest possible skateboard-breaking scenarios for this particular hazard-rich area.
Anyways: here’s the Rathaus!As I mentioned, very church-like, right down to the vaulted, nave-esque interior and stained glass.The big plaza out front was full of tourists, drunks, and these ugly trees that I recognized from both London and the UC Berkeley campus. Why does everyone keep planting these ugly trees all over the place?I sat down to eat an apple next to this crazy dude in a blue jean jacket. He kept doing the follow things: looking at the numerous clocks around the plaza, counting his cigarettes, chasing after one of his empty tallboys when the wind blew it away, and babbling to himself (and maybe to me, I couldn’t really tell) about time auf Deutsch. He was saying something like, “Do you have the time? Do you have the time? Yes we all have time, time has us! Even the Burgermeister [mayor] number one, he has time! Do you have the time? What a crazy question! Yes of course we have time, what else would we have! Do you have the time?” I was feeling very surrounded by clocks and history and found this dude fascinating and unsettling.Found this bizarre, less-than-life-sized bronze of cigar-chompin’ Che Guevara on my way off the platz. No idea how that got there.Me in front of this nice lake in the middle of the city. I loved all the water in Hamburg—Berlin is very green for such a big city, but you have to get way out into the burbs to find real big bodies of H20.Mysterious couple on a bench with new cigarettes scattered on the ground all around them. Never figured this one out.
On my way back to the hostel I encountered Tuesday’s excellent dumb-luck discovery: a huge inner-city park/botanical garden. Here are some nicely trimmed conifers w/ Hamburg’s TV tower in the background.They were very proud of this Japanese tea garden. A sign assured me the garden had been designed by some Japanese master gardener to create the sensation of an artistic-yet-not-artificial natural space, and the authentic teahouse was imported from Japan.

Totally awesome-looking plastic volcano complex playground-thing. I would have taken more photos but single dudes photographing children is a generally frowned-upon thing.The banks around this central lake were very cleverly landscaped to maximize lakeside seating. One side had a fortified, architectural look to it,While the other was more au naturel. Two cool, unique, good-looking solutions to the problem of limited shoreline—well done, German gardeners!

An idyllic scene featuring ducks and children in golden evening light. This grass was like green velvet.Oh hey, it’s that carnival again! This photo is kind of blurry but it has a real “evidence of UFOs” feel to it that I like.More awesome playground equipment—a 50-foot, two-lane zip line. I wanted to try it out but right after I took this photo a bunch of dumb kids showed up and used it instead. They also pushed me down and called me names. Stupid kid jerks.

Just before I left the park I came upon a little plaza, ringed by benches, with 20’ by 20’ chessboard in the middle and two dudes playing with huge plastic pieces while spectators looked on with their chins in their hands. I avoided photography out of respect for the goofy old dudes having heated arguments about chess.

A perfectly good-looking pineapple that I found on the street outside my hostel. I couldn’t find anything wrong with it, but I never quite worked up the nerve/desperation to cut it up and eat it. I ended up leaving it perched on my balcony to confuse future tenants and passersby.

That night I wandered back down the harbor and into a bar called Ahoi (German for “Ahoy”). No, it was not a haunt for gay sailors—it was a grungy, smoky, fairly hip little joint full of layabouts and weary professionals. I met a German woman named Josephine and her Italian business partner, Fabio. Fabio had a wall-eye and loved foosball, so I lost a couple of games to him before walking back to my hostel through a thunderstorm. I got pretty wet but it was nice to hear thunder again.

The Beatles Platz looked good at night:I had eaten a light dinner with a late-night snack in mind. In particular, I wanted to sample an Imbiss (fast food stand) with this cocky sign out front:The large text reads “Attention!!! Extremely Spicy”, and the (unfortunately very blurry) smaller text details 12 individual levels of spiciness. I ordered Pommes (French fries) at Spicy Level 10, which the waitress insisted on downgrading to 8. I figured I could always get it spicier when 8 didn’t cut it. Oh, how wrong I was.

That little basket of fries proved to be the absolute spiciest thing I have ever eaten. I made it through exactly two bites before I had to throw away my food and quickstep down the street to my hostel, futilely rinsing my mouth with beer. After 20 minutes of flushing out my mouth with cold water, I was together enough to get some photographic evidence of how badly those fries messed me up:I cannot understand how that was only an 8. It was like someone sprayed mace in my mouth. Leading theory: the waitress wanted to teach me a lesson for arrogantly ordering a 10 and gave me a 12 instead.

Those fries didn’t fill me up, but they did kill my appetite until the next morning. A German breakfast buffet was included in price of my room. German breakfast is meat and cheese and bread and hard boiled eggs with lots of coffee—I had to fill up two of these thimble-sized juice glasses to get enough OJ, and that little apple was tough to find among the wide variety of cold cuts and white bread. Still: cheap and filling.

I couldn’t resist one last photo of Stu and the gang in the morning sun.
Goodbye, Hamburg! You were neat! And your blog post was super huge and took so long to write that I am now a week behind on posting photos! Expect a couple photo dumps pretty soon here—I suddenly have an itchy shutter finger.