30 May: Sauntering in the sun

The sky was blue, the sun was beckoning, we set out to go wherever our feet would take us.

We wandered through streets and beside canals, enjoying the shops, scenes, and quirky corners of this beautiful city.

Down by the waterfront we found the Kontorviertel, the quarter where the great merchant families built their headquarters in the early 1900s, in the latest style, with magnificent archways decorated with monumental bronze figures. These are now UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Soon the magnificent Elphi was looming above us, with the irregularly shaped panels on the Concert Hall rippling like waves in the sunlight.

Who knows when we will be back? So we rode the escalator/ travelator again up to the café for a coffee and made the mistake of looking into the gift shop. A Ravensburger jigsaw! All those glass panels! All that sky!

Neil had to have it. I was seduced by the Elphi snow globe. My excuse was my grand-daughters. Now we really had to buy that extra suitcase.

We set off again past the Port Fire Brigade Headquarters (great contrast between the sleek modern engine and the elaborate brick building with its fancy cornices, row of stone archways and neat row of red and white pot-plants.(Hansa colours).

Two high bronze cupolas reared above the surrounding buildings. Aha! A church, thought I. But as we rounded the corner , where a tent city of booths and market stalls was setting up for the next day’s Hamburg Ironman, we realised this was the Hamburg Rathaus, the City Hall. Marie-Thérèse had been very keen for us to see it. Now here it was in front of us, a palace fit for a great trading city in its prime.

There were no guided tours that day, but we looked around the huge foyer and courtyard with its fountain, each figure holding an emblem of the city’s trade and manufacture. I was pleased we got to see it.

On the side of the Platz in front was yet another reminder of Hamburg’s Hanseatic past (I counted three in our walk): the historic Stock Exchange , or Hanseatische Wertpapierbörse Hamburg, picked out in gold leaf.

We were running out of feet by this time (over 11,000 steps) so took a taxi home.

As we walked to the hotel, there was another Stumbling Stone, for Herbert Frank, born 1884, who lived here, deported in 1943 to Theresienstadt (Terezin), murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. In Germany, the past is never far away.Læs mere