March 29 - Der Michel (St. Michaels) in Hamburg

Monika set up a spreadsheet to keep track of our joint expenses, and that reminded me of Mammi (Monika’s mother) and Aunt Size’s old system for keeping track of who owed who what. You see, Size lived near Aldi while Mammi lived near other major stores like Pro and Spar. So Mammi and Size would check the paper to see which store had what items on sale. Then each one would buy the things on sale at the stores near them and they would meet out at Reinbek to split the loot and total up the bill. They were religious about writing down who paid what and calculating the net balance owed to the pfennig. When we visited, I still remember accompanying Mammi while she carried bags of sale items out to Reinbek on the S-Bahn, followed by a rather extensive session of joint reckoning with Size before the final payment was made. This clearly satisfied the urge to be thrifty for both of them, but I think it also served as an excuse for the sisters to get together and chat over Kaffeetrinken. In any case, keeping tally of who paid for what was certainly in the grand old tradition for our Reinbek house and the ghost of Aunt Size, if any such was around, would certainly have approved.

Since the sun was peeking thru the clouds, we decided to take a tour of the Rathaus (city hall) and walk from there down past St. Michael’s church to the harbor. We tried to change money at a Reinbek branch bank, but since Lois did not have an account there, they would have charged an extra fee of 4.50 Euro, which seemed a little steep. They recommended a money exchange instead, so when we changed trains at Hauptbahnhof we asked at the money exchange there how much we would get from $300. The girl there replied that at the current exchange rate we would get 233 Euro, but from that they would deduct a service charge of 50 Euro! We thought that was simply outrageous and decided to try the branch of the Dresden Bank next to the Alsterhaus. They turned out to give us a better rate of exchange and charged no extra fees, so Lois finally ended up 237 Euro for the $300 (exchange rate of .79 Euro for $1). Now she had the courage and resources to face the all the bookstores, bakeries and restaurants of Hamburg.

We walked over to the Rathaus and tried to take a tour, but they were not giving any tours at all. In fact, they were actually closed until the following Saturday for some kind of road racing convention—it seemed to be a series of sports car races. Well, we decided to try again the following week, so that was strike two for the Rathaus tour. Instead we walked down to the Michaelskirche and sat down during the last part of a service that featured beautiful organ music. St. Michael has 3 organs, a huge one in the rear of the church, a medium one off to one side, and a small one hidden somewhere that we could not discern. The largest one was playing Bach and it was just beautiful (Lois and Monika, who have much more musical expertise, agree with me on that). I counted about 1 ½ seconds of echoing after the last organ chords were played, but I’m not sure whether this was a true echo from the vaulted ceilings or some kind of a gradual release of the air pressure in the huge pipes, but it certainly was impressive. The Baroque structure and ornamentation of the church once again impressed me with the use of gilt decoration to effectively offset both the cream white of the interior walls and the dark wood and marble of the altar. Lois remarked that she enjoyed all the curving lines and that the church seemed very “joyful” and had a completely different atmosphere from many if not most of the old European churches.

After the service we repaired across the street for a very leisurely lunch at La Michelle (necessitated by slow service!) where I had a noodle dish and Monika and Lois had veal and salads. The food was great but my pleasure, at least, was somewhat offset by the reek of stale cigarette smoke hanging in the air. I could kind of get used to that, but when one of the other customers lit up and started puffing in our direction, that really interfered with the taste of my meal. Oh well, I guess that’s just one price you pay for a pro-smoking culture like we used to have in the U.S. and Germany still has. Latter that day I saw a youngster skulking around the cigarette vending machine across from Aldi’s and furtively digging the money out of his pocket to buy a pack. So the U.S. cigarette companies had clearly scored another victory in their campaign to get teens addicted. The addiction research seems to indicate that they have to catch their new addicts while they are young and stupid—the likelihood of getting addicted drops sharply after the age of 20 or thereabouts, as I recall. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen at all for folks past 20. If you have really stupid people even older than that, they can start in smoking and get addicted while giving lame excuses to their parents like “I only smoke a couple of times a month” or “I can stop anytime I want, I just don’t want to”. Then they can just collapse with massive heart attacks in their 30s and 40s like Steve and Herb or die in their 50s with cancer like Jean or have massive strokes and lose parts of their brain like Phyllis. It’s amazing how stupid smart folks can be, and I really hate waiting around to see which of my friends or relatives will be killed by smoking next. Sigh.

Despite the smoke I managed to enjoy my lunch and a part of Monika’s. As we ate we talked over Lois’s reluctance to go to the top of the Michael’s steeple and found out she was thinking of climbing hundreds of steps. We reassured her that the elevator did most of the work, and so after lunch we paid our 2.50 Euro each and took the elevator to the observation platform at the top of the steeple. We were rewarded by a clear blue sky and beautiful view in all directions, just like last year (see Wanderung 2). However, I remember clearly that last year it was so windy and cold that we avoided certain sections of the observation deck because we kind of got blown backwards (see Wanderung 2). This year the view was beautiful in all directions. I should caution the Gentle Reader that the weather often does not cooperate in Hamburg and obscures the view from the tower of the Michaelskirche, so you may not be as lucky as we were.

We did take the stairs back down and had a great view of the huge bells along the way, taking care to do it between 2 and 2:15 so that we made it past between the scheduled ringing. We saw the old clockwork mechanism preserved in a glass case (at least I don’t think it was the current one) somewhere around the 8th level. We also read a plaque about the 6th level that for 300 years a trumpeter has played from the 4 directions of the steeple at 10 a.m. and 9 p.m. every day—some type of religious reason, I think. Any tradition that goes back 300 years is a real tradition in my book! At the bottom we walked back into the church and looked around to get a closer look at some of the decorations, the organ pipes, and so forth. I saw one name on a list of lost mariners of World War I that had the name “LTN Charles Hamilton” on it, and I was mystified by such an English-sounding name for a German war casualty. We bought some post cards on our way out and walked down a promenade about two blocks to the harbor.

We checked out the sailboats, tugs, and tour boats in the harbor and watched the sailors furling the sails on the Russian sailboat Mir. But decided we didn’t have the time to do a harbor tour before our CC Karten turned into pumpkins. Instead we jumped the U-3 subway at the elevated station at the harbor to get to Hauptbahnhof and changed over the the S21 S-Bahn to Reinbek. We were, in fact, checked by the Kontrolle on our way to Reinbek, so it was good that we were still before the 4 p.m. limit. We’ve been checked now 5 times in the past month, and that would have been a pretty expensive set of train rides if we had not had the CC Karten.

We even found a bus waiting for us at Reinbek, so we didn’t have to march back up the hill to get home, which was good as Lois said her legs were a little tired. We settled in for a comfortable Kaffeetrinken followed a little later by a light supper, and then took a quick ½ hour walk in the woods. It was still light enough to do that since the switch to daylight savings time had given us the extra hour of daylight in the evening. After the sun finally set, we spent the rest of the evening being warmed by a fire while we watched the news and “Millionaire” on TV where the first woman ever won the 1,000,000 Euro prize. Boy was she happy!