29 May: COVID!!!

No, we haven’t got COVID - Phew!

But Marie-Thérèse’s son had tested positive. To be on the safe side, we agreed with Marie-Thérèse that we should move to a hotel. She knew a hotel in town used by visiting singers, and they had a vacancy.

So we relocated to the Hotel Vorbach. A stressful morning, and a bit sad, as Marie-Thérèse has been absolutely brilliant, and tireless in getting us to experience the things she loves about living in Hamburg. Thanks heaps Marie-Thérèse, hope we can do the same for you when you’re in NZ next!

Once we were settled in the room, the three of us went round the corner to Yu Gardens, a Chinese restaurant in a beautiful building apparently modelled on a Ming dynasty garden in Shanghai. We enjoyed an exquisite Chinese meal of Peking duck, spicy beef and a salad with avocado and prawns - yum!!

Next we walked next door to the museum with the longest name we’ve encountered: “Museum am Rothenbaum, Kulturen und Künste der Welt”, or MARKK. Among the many cultural treasures in this ethnological museum are looted Benin bronzes awaiting return to Nigeria, and - wait for it - a complete 19th century Te Arawa wharenui, named Rauru.

Rauru (named after the honoured inventor of wood carving) was constructed in Whakarewarewa from 1897 to 1900. It was not a tribal house, but was privately commissioned by a Pākehā hotel keeper Charles Nelson. Hamburg Museum acquired Rauru in 1907.

Tribal members came to Hamburg from Aotearoa in 2012 and undertook extensive restoration. Rauru is now perfect!

There were also interesting spirit figures and animal totems from Papua New Guinea, plus a collection of creepy devil masks from the Tyrol region of Austria.
Locals still dress up in these for traditional parades (see the green mask at the end). You get the feeling that these Krampus figures go back a very long way.Read more