April 16 - Going to the Dom (Fair)

Despite our good intentions to run out to Moelln for another 15-kilometer walk, we were both just too tired and stiff for it to be fun, so we spent the day in Hamburg. I had to return my defective watch to Karstadt and Monika wanted to go to the Dom (as in city fair, not the cathedral). We started packing for our trip back, and that was trickier than you might think. We first tried packing up a box of books and a box of CDs to send back by surface mail, but at the Post Office we found that the cost would be 29 Euro, so we ditched that plan. Our plan B was to try to pack everything in our two wheeled Pullmans, two backpacks, and two carry-on packs, so after we returned to the house we tried that.

In the old days, I seem to remember just throwing everything in a suitcase and then sitting on the thing so I could get the latches closed. Nowadays there are several different kinds of constraints that conspired to make our packing more difficult. Some things, like my computer, are not allowed in the checked luggage but instead must be taken in the carry-on luggage. Other things, like the work tools I had accumulated, were not allowed in carry-on luggage but instead had to be packed in the checked luggage. Other things, like books, were allowed in either type of luggage. But we each had a 32-kilogram weight limit and those books weighed a ton, so we tried to push most of them into the carry-on luggage. Dirty clothes could be used to cushion things in our wheeled Pullmans, but the clean clothes had to be in the backpacks that we planned to use for our final weekend at Heinke and Gustl’s place.

After struggling with that for a while, we took a nap, had Mittagsessen, and headed off for the Hamburg Dom with Kimi’s mail just in case we could meet her there someplace. The fairground area was really pretty large, so we wandered around the fair for a couple of hours all together. We played some of the “active” type of games where you roll a ball, hit something, or shoot something. Monika also tried the slot machines, but had no luck this time. There were several lottery-type of games, but we avoided them altho one had a motorized skateboard like I had been thinking about as a prize. This thing was called a Monopol and had the engine right over the rear wheel, but no front brake that I could see so I’m not sure how well it would decelerate.

We took a really old haunted house ride and also road the bumper cars, altho we were both in the same car this time. Usually we ride in separate cars and really enjoy ramming into each other, but this time we ran into other folks. Lots of fun and a lot cheaper than doing it with real cars! We also tried calling Kimi several times as we were perambulating around but had no luck, so we just carried her mail back to Reinbek to try again some other day.

There were, of course, a LOT of places to eat and drink at the Dom, and we did finally break down and buy some French fries. The most curious place was a Lego Land tent sponsored by the Danish tourist industry. In there they had Lego statues and towns, gave away tourist brochures, sold Danish food, and had places for children to play with Legos, of course. But in the back they had a fake beach set up complete with sand and seeded with little pieces of amber! Finally I was able to find amber on a beach, albeit a fake beach in an amusement park in Hamburg, Germany. But hey, both of us found some promising pieces that looked like amber and when Monika used the float-in-salt-water test we found one small, whitish piece that floated! Hurray! Altho tiny, that was more piece of amber than we ever found in over a week of searching the real beaches on the Baltic Sea last year (see Wanderung 2). So if you want to go searching for amber on the beach some day, I would recommend that you skip the real beaches and come to the Lego Land exhibit at the Hamburg Dom instead!

In size, the Dom is about the same size as a state fair in the U.S. Compared to the state fairs I have attended in the U.S., there were more shooting games on the midway (at least 5) and many more places to eat and drink. One noticeable difference was that almost every one of those places sold alcoholic beverages from beer to hard liquor. In general, I noticed that drinking alcoholic beverages in public in Germany was an accepted, everyday occurrence. Beer, in particular, seemed to be considered a normal beverage and no one paid any attention to people drinking beer on the streets, on trains or so forth, whereas in the U.S. I think that would definitely be frowned upon. In some areas with “open container” laws, I think it would be illegal to drink in public like that, but I’m not sure. In Germany I also noticed the byproduct of the empty liquor bottles as part of the debris alongside the streets and paths, but I’m not really sure if that problem is more, less, or about the same as in the U.S. Altho some folks who were drinking, like the soccer fans we saw going to and from the games who were definitely three sheets to the wind, they were never rude or threatening. Boisterous yes but threatening no. In fact, I felt much more safe wandering around in Germany with its really strict gun control laws than in Virginia with its “Guns R Us” stores.

The Germans, in fact, even control dangerous breeds of dogs, which would not ever go over in the U.S. as far as I know, altho the District of Columbia tried something along those lines a couple of years back. That was not true 5 years ago but Gustl told me a young girl had been mauled to death by two vicious dogs that had tunneled under a schoolyard fence and attacked her during recess. It was horrible but caused Germans to enact laws that prohibited importing or breeding the pit bulls, etc. In fact, Heinke said that just to own one of the proscribed breeds you had to take the animal in and have it tested! The test would have bicycles, pedestrians, and cars go past the dog and apparently if the dog reacted negatively to anything it would be destroyed. So the Germans have dog control as well as gun control and I can definitely say that in all our wandering around, all the dogs were quiet and well behaved except for one pair of young dogs we met on a trail in the countryside outside of Moelln. The owner apologized for their behavior and physically grabbed them by the collar until we were on our way, so even that situation never felt really dangerous like the time a pack of snarling dogs started encircling me on a Volksmarch in West Virginia. That time, the owner of at least one of those dogs was looking on and did absolutely nothing, and we had to carefully work our way backwards out of the rather frightening situation. I like dogs, but that incident made me buy a can of pepper spray to carry along in the future. In general, we feel threatened by loose, ill-trained dogs several times a year in the U.S. and I never felt that way in Germany despite the fact that dogs were just as common on the streets. In fact people took dogs everywhere in Germany and some folks even took them with to the Dom, altho I didn’t see any dogs driving the bumper cars! Anyway, we went home after the Dom and had a relaxing evening watching Das Quiz and Millionaire before turning in for the night.