March 27 - Lois first day in Hamburg

Using the third and final green plastic garden chair at the kitchen table (there was no other table in the house, but the one we did have was in the kitchen), we all had a very comfortable breakfast while trying to figure out what to do for the day. This was somewhat complicated by a march of the Neo-Nazis somewhere in Hamburg—about 600 Neo-Nazis where expected plus 3,000 counter-demonstrators and at least 3,000 police to make sure the two groups stayed apart! We didn’t want to accidentally walk into the middle of that, but we couldn’t quite make out where exactly the march was taking place so we weren’t sure whether we could walk around downtown or not. The weather was, altho quite cold (mid-20s overnight), sunny and clear in the morning, which was good weather to see the city (and take pictures, of course).

Lois’s first impressions of Hamburg, Germany were, and I quote, “I like it!” Monika took her shopping at Aldi while I brought the journal up to date, and after that we decided to risk it and take the train downtown for a “stadtbummel” (no literal translation, but wandering around a city to get to know it comes close). Lois also noticed the prevalence of graffiti but also remarked on “lots of lovely flowers that are NOT blooming in Wisconsin”, and said that she saw “a lot of signs with English words that I didn’t expect”. She spent some time looking at a map of northern Germany to get oriented, particularly with respect to the former East Germany zone that was here when she visited Patience and Jake in Bremen in 1989 and they toured Berlin. When she visited again in 1995 they visited the Eagle’s Nest in the south but by then East Germany was history, both literally and figuratively.

We took the train downtown and wandered from Hauptbahnhof thru the shopping district to the Rathaus, visiting Karstadt along the way where Lois picked up some earrings. But when we reached the Rathaus, the line for tour tickets was so long that we put off that tour for another day and instead continued walking down the canal to reach the Inner Alster. Along the way we saw several fine examples of the Hummel figures with the sunlight on them, which helped bring out the brilliant and often quite unusual colors. I got caught in a bookstore and bought a science fiction book by Vonda McIntyre that I had read a long time ago in English ( if I remembered correctly); it was only 1.50 Euro so I bought it to add to my “easy German” reading collection. And when I found a book dedicated to VW Buses, I immediately though of my brother Terry, who owns an old one, and picked it up for him.I finally managed to give it to him when our paths crossed in Bismarck, North Dakota, during Wanderung 6 and he seemed to like it.

We continued walking past the Hamburg State Opera but couldn’t really find a restaurant we liked, so we continued on to Damtor and hopped on an S-21 S-Bahn back to Reinbek. We were all getting a bit tired, so we were happy to catch a 236 bus at the station that drove us back up the hill to the stop across from the Aldi store ½ block from our house. Monika fixed a great lunch of Frikadelle and noodles and we rested our feet a bit while discussing the German recycling system. In Reinbek the trash and recyclable things had to be separated and where picked up on alternating weeks, but that meant that we had to keep trash and recyclable things around for up to two weeks before they were picked up, and that could entail quite an accumulation. In Germany the focus for home recycling seemed to be more on the recycling of plastics, whereas the public recycling containers such as we found on train platforms divided things into four categories: all containers whether plastic or metal or composite, paper, glass, and everything else. In Virginia paper and glass are also considered distinct categories for recycling, but the metal and glass containers must be recycled separately and the composite containers are not recycled at all as far as I know. German law requires deposits on all plastic bottles and metal cans, but stores don’t have to accept all containers as returns. Aldi, for example, will accept only plastic bottles but not the metal cans or glass bottles so Monika was forced to drink beer from plastic bottles! That turned out to be handy when a 6-pack dropped off the back of her bike—only one of the plastic bottles broke and the leak was slow enough that she could still salvage a glass of beer from it by the time we got home. You can imagine her relief.

The awkward part of the system, at least for us, was that only the plastic recycling was picked up from the house. We had to separately pack up the cardboard, glass, and paper and carry it about ½ mile to the nearest public recycling containers. That entailed a modest amount of effort that most Germans seemed willing to make, but I really didn’t think it would play that well in the U.S. Even in Germany, the awkwardness of recycling may have been at least one contributing cause to the prevalence of litter we found in some areas. The radio station we listened to was sponsoring a “Hamburg Cleans Up!” campaign for community groups to pick up the litter, so clearly it was a problem.

With this kind of stimulating discussion about garbage, Lois started to feel a bit sleepy so we took a short walk down the Kuckallee and back along the main street just to jazz up the old system and keep her awake. We felt so good afterward that we rewarded ourselves with Kaffeetrinken and then sat chatting at the table until we discovered it was time for dinner! As Lois remarked, this is quite a system! After such a marathon meal we relaxed with crossword puzzles and books until the evening news, after which we watched another musical special called “Street of Songs” before turning in for the night. The special began in Strasburg and kind of wandered from the Alsace region to the Black Forest area. The music was good and the photography was great—that certainly looked like a very picturesque area of Germany.