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Wanderung 5

Happy Haus for Holt’s in Hamburg.

February - April 2004

March 4 - Going Shopping in Downtown Hamburg

Whoa! A sunny day! Monika wanted to try to do some shopping in downtown Hamburg, and altho I thought it was a shame to waste a sunny day, there were quite a few items still on our list so I agreed. But The Sun has a strange effect on the northern Germans—they seem to start to shed clothing as soon as they see the sun. I must admit that after several days without seeing the sun I had the same impulse to start shedding layers when I saw it.

When we went outside we saw furniture and large discarded items sitting alongside the curbs, and Monika told me this was the once-a-month opportunity to throw out large items (“Sperrmuell” day). Well, I couldn’t pass up that opportunity! I rummaged around a particularly promising pile of junk and came up a table for the living room, some boards I could cut to make slats for the one bed frame we had, and some pieces of door framing to complete the doorway to the basement. Nothing was perfect, of course, but you really can’t expect that when rummaging around in junk piles and we happily carted our booty about ½ block back to Aunt Size’s house before walking down to the train station for the trip into the city.

The train ride to Hauptbahnhof in Hamburg was 25 minutes and the scenery looked a bit different and decidedly more cheerful in the bright sunlight. Unfortunately, that also emphasized the plethora of brightly-painted graffiti that lined both sides of the train route. As in our last visit (Wanderung 2), the tolerance for graffiti and things like vandalized windows on the train carriage windows surprises me in such an otherwise orderly society and is a contrast to the U.S. situation. Whenever we had the chance, we always tried to seek out the seats besides the unscratched windows so we could get a unobstructed view of the scenery.

From Hauptbahnhof we walked south into the main downtown business district of Hamburg. I got hung up in a bookstore that lured me in with tables of cheap books outside on the sidewalk. Getting tight control on my impulse to buy some Asterix and Pollux comic books (if I had grandchildren I’d use them as an excuse to buy comics), I finally settled on the German version of Herriot’s “All Creatures Great and Small”. In the German version it is called “Der Doktor und Das Liebe Vieh” (The Doctor and the Dear Animals) and I bought it because I would enjoy re-reading it and thought that it would also help my German enormously. I also looked unsuccessfully for Kirst’s “Gunner Asch” series about a WWII soldier, but no luck.

Monika helped pry me out of the bookstore and we continued along a line of stores until we reached Karstadt, a quite large, central department store. Karstadt actually stretches across two distinct buildings connected at the upper levels, and it has a quite large selection of goods in many categories. We at last bought the potato brush, mushroom brush and wastebasket that Monika was searching for. I found a non-skid bathtub mat that would hopefully keep me from breaking my neck in the shower—the combination of a low, slanted ceiling plus a high bathtub sill, plus a slippery surface had left me grasping for a non-existent handle or brace every morning!

Monika also found a slotted serving spoon and a can of PAM cooking spray, but she decided that both were too expensive for the likes of us. Karstadt’s prices are high like in U.S. department stores except for the special sales, which typically offered things quite cheaply. For example, down in the sale section Monika found and bought a nice porcelain serving bowl that should match our Hutschenreuther dinnerware. It had been reduced from 40 Euro to 8 Euro, which I thought was quite reasonable for good quality porcelain.

But finding cheap things is a double-edged sword depending on whether you need it or whether you’ve just bought one at a higher price! I found a whetstone for the ax, a claw hammer, and two sets of tiny drill bits—the ones I always break first when I have a complete set. I was really happy to find those tiny bits a 2 Euro for 10 tiny bits of different sizes—I’ve been looking for a set like that for years. Alas, I also found a nice, handy electric drill for only 12 Euro, much cheaper that the one I had just bought at Aldi for 35 Euro! The only consolation I could summon was that the one I bought at Aldi was much more powerful and suitable for drilling in concrete than the cheaper one at Karstadt. That rationalization would only make sense, of course, if I ended up drilling a lot of holes in my basement, for example, but I really couldn’t imagine why I would want to do such a thing. Oh well. The lesson for other folks in my situation (moving into an sparsely furnished fixer-upper house in Germany for a couple of months) is to thoroughly look around for the cheap tools on sale at Karstadt, Aldi, and other stores before paying full retail prices (Horrors!). On the whole, though, we were quite happy with our purchases and headed back to Hauptbahnhof with our set of plastic bags in hand. While Monika fixed lunch I used my new hammer to pull some nails out of the doorframe to the basement that was missing the right side and the top. That wouldn’t have been so bad if it were on the basement side, but the missing pieces were on the central hallway side and the exposed rough edges of concrete and plaster felt aesthetically like a slap in the face whenever I looked at it.

The German claw hammer was distinct from a typical U.S. model in having one long claw and one short claw, kind of like a lobster only different. I could only guess that the single, pointed claw is used to pry up bent over nails or staples. The hammer also had a waffle design on the hammer face rather than being flat, maybe so it could double as a meat tenderizer? The final difference was a large groove right on the top of the hammer, and I couldn’t even guess what that was for. If any of you Gentle Readers know, please send me an email. I admit that I have fun trying to figure out the artifacts like tools that come from other cultures, but that groove on top had me stumped.

After lunch we went for a long walk in a small public forest that starts only a block from our house. We wandered down to the stream and to a small lake and dam that we had visited on our last trip to Germany while walking with Heinke and Gustl (see Wanderung 2). The sun was heading for the horizon, but we got to the castle before sunset.

On the way back past the train station to the house we passed an open-air market and stopped off for some hot dogs with mustard. U.S. hot dogs really don’t compare with the variety and taste of the German “Wurst”. German Wursts range from short and really fat to long and really thin, with almost everyone possible variation in between. The mustard is also to die for, once you get used to it—it’s quite a bit stronger than the U.S. standard, so if you ever have hot dogs in Germany go easy on the mustard until you’ve tried it. The “mild” version of German mustard is about twice as strong as U.S. mustard, and the “strong” version will literally clear out your sinuses and make your eyes water. We had three small, thin hot dogs with the “mild” mustard for only1.70 Euro total—oh bliss!

I was so happy after our snack I encouraged Monika to buy 10 roses to take home with us. Back in the States I would typically have bought a dozen roses, but over here they sold them by the tens! We also found that eggs are being sold in packages of 10 rather than by the dozen. When you think of it, it probably makes more sense to sell things in packages of 10, but we were so used to buying by the dozen or the gross that it seemed strange to us. Actually, given the smaller size of the average refrigerator in Germany, the package of 10 eggs probably makes a lot more sense. When we got back to the house, Monika put the roses into a vase she had found in an old hutch in the basement that had belonged to her grandparents. We didn’t know whether this old vase had also belonged to her grandparents, but it certainly looked nice on the fireplace mantel with the roses in it.

Underneath our newly decorated mantel we still had our evening fire, of course, and watched the “Wok Games” after the evening news. Altho you might suppose the Germans to be a serious people, they do have a fine sense of the ridiculous and the Wok Games were a great example of that. These games consist of sliding on cooking woks down the ice-covered bobsled course at Innsbruck, Austria. These really are standard cooking woks that have been reinforced and had seats glued into them, but they reach a speed of up to 90 kilometers an hour on the way down the course. The combination of quite seriously reinforcing and equipping the cooking woks and then engaging in a ridiculous competition to slide down the track shows a unique side of German culture, one that you wouldn’t see unless you watched some of their odder shows.

The show like this I remember fondly from the old days is “Spiel Ohne Grenze” (Play without borders) from around 1973. In that game, teams from the different European countries would compete in completely ridiculous contests like throwing fish up a chute as quickly as possible. Completely senseless, really, but I liked it and even then I thought it was a good sign for the future of Europe. I wonder how much influence odd things like that have compared to the carefully orchestrated machinations of the politicians for European unity. Given the history of Europe up until 1950, I’m sure the rest of the world is terribly happy about European unity, and it’s fascinating how many eastern European countries are now trying to climb aboard. I never thought the common European currency would happen, but it certainly has and if this union can solve other issues like that, it really could be an economic powerhouse to rival the U.S. and Asia. If so, the future could be really interesting.

We tried hitting the sack around 10 p.m. again—I was still trying to get my body clocks reset. But slowly my biorhythms were getting with the program, so to speak. The night before I had been awake from 4 to 5 a.m., but the last night I had finally slept in until 6. My fondest wish was to manage to get a full, uninterrupted night’s sleep and awaken at some reasonable hour like 7, but that wish was as yet unfulfilled. Fortunately I had no other signs of jet lag, so all together this was a minor annoyance.

Copyright 2004 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

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