Day 273: Exploring Hamburg

Up and out early this morning - Hamburg has quite a large World Heritage area, and since it's rapidly approaching the winter solstice, we've got less and less daylight to work with. Well, not that you get much daylight, since it's been gloomy and overcast for at least the last couple of weeks! But with the sun setting at 4pm these days, you just sort of have to get out earlier.

So off we went. Walked downtown, about 20 minutes away, to the old core of Hamburg. The actual world heritage area is a series of warehouses and office blocks dating variously from the 17th to the early 20th centuries. Hamburg (despite being 100km inland) is one of the world's busiest ports, second in Europe only to Rotterdam (which it feels similar to!), and it actually has more canals and bridges than Venice and Amsterdam combined.

We wandered around the old warehouse district, looking at the impressive old brick buildings, many of which still had their shipping heritage visible (cranes etc), though the shipping these days happens elsewhere. Also had a look at the very impressive Chilehaus, one of the most unique buildings in the city. It takes up an entire block, 10 stories high, and shaped like a a boat, naturally. It's called Chilehaus because the main guy behind the project made his fortune importing saltpeter from Chile.

We walked back and forth along the canals, doing bits of filming here and there when the weather cooperated with us. Slight drizzle kept coming and going which was a bit frustrating! By lunchtime we'd basically exhausted the world heritage area, so found a food court which seemed popular with the local office workers and grabbed some Indian food for lunch.

Next we headed over to see the rest of the old city. Wandered up and down the main shopping streets, checked out the impressive town hall, and just generally explored. Sort of like the way we used to do before we had to focus everything on world heritage sites! And it's always nice to not have to film.

Spent a bit of time chilling out in a coffee shop with a hot drink and some cakes, since the inclement rain wasn't letting up. Eventually we headed back, but not before stopping at a department store for a look around. Shandos wasn't impressed when I took a long, drooling look at a laptop on sale for a mere 10,000 euros!!

Back home around dusk where we chilled out for a couple of hours, then headed out for dinner. Went to a restaurant about 10 minutes walk away, on what is one of Hamburg's better eat streets. We aren't in the trendiest area, but a further 10 minutes from the main station and the kebab shops gradually become hipster coffee shops.

We chose a German restaurant and settled in for our fill of German food - meat, potato and beer!Read more