Hamburg

We found an apartment in Hamburg's Altona area. This used to be considered a suburb when it was planned, but now it's just a neighborhood on the west side. Our train took us to the Altona station from Wroclaw, as it was the end of the line, so that was convenient. Hamburg is not too well known in the US, but it's Germany's 2nd largest city and largest port. It's where most Germans who emigrated to America left from. The Elbe flows through the city and down into the North sea. There are canals off of the river, so you're always crossing a bridge when you're near the river it seems. It's got a great transportation network, and once again, we bought a 3 day city card that allows all transportation, including the city ferries, and reductions on museums.

The Beatles honed their skills here working up to 6 hours a day for most days of the week. In the late 50's Hamburg was a gritty port city with a seedy side in the area of St. Pauli. Prostitution, hard drinking, music, money? That's what drew the Beatles here from Liverpool. Even though Britain won the war and fire-bombed the city in 1943, less than 15 years after the war, Hamburg was where the money was, and not Liverpool. That firebombing of Hamburg by the RAF was in retaliation of a Luftwaffe bombing of Coventry. The damage here and lives lost was worse than the better known Dresden bombing.

But that's all ancient history and there's hardly any mention of the Beatles in town. There's a pathetic statue area near the bars they played at and some song titles in plaques laid in the ground. One night, we walked into the Indra club where the Beatles had a regular gig. There is still music here, but not when we arrived. A few photos of the Beatles on the wall is about all the tribute you'll find. Instead, it's a New Orleans-like atmosphere nearby, but much tamer and smaller in area. Granted, we were here on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, but it wasn't too wild and nothing like Frenchmen or Bourbon St. in New Orleans.

We explored several neighborhoods and only went to one museum, a maritime museum. It was huge but mostly had collections that only a Navy fanatic would love. There were lots of model ships of all sizes. LOTS. And uniforms, and maritime art. The most interesting were model ships made of bone by French navy prisoners captured by the British during the Napoleonic wars.

There are several music clubs in the city and mid-week, there were a couple of bands each night to choose from. And lots of DJs of course, but that's not for us. We chose to go to the Knust Club. It's probably a spoof of "Kunst:" which means "art" in German. An american punk band called SamIAm was playing. We didn't know their music but went anyway since live music is so hard to come by in Europe, unless you're at a festival. The crowd was good and the music was OK. For dinner, we just split some CurryWurst at the stand out front. That's the famous Berlin ketchup mixed with curry powder on top of a sliced brat over fries. We've yet to find some that is as good as our first CurryWursts we had in Berlin 8 years ago.

We're getting a little tired of heavy German fare, so we opted for Vietnamese for lunch and Spanish tapas for dinner yesterday. There's no end of variety of cuisine here or most cities we've been in. In short, I'd say Hamburg has a lot to offer but we are definitely slowing down after 7+ weeks of travel and only scratched the surface a bit. That being said, we're still lapping everyone on the couch.

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