Wanderung 31

Wow, thank goodness I managed to get 12 solid hours of good quality sleep! My CPAP device, affectionately known as "Herr Machine", said I had only 1.7 apnea events per hour (normal is less than 5 events per hour), and as a result I felt very refreshed and ready to see Hamburg with Linda and Jerry. Our first step was to have breakfast with them at a bakery right next to the hotel at the entrance to the train station. It was warm enough to sit outdoors, which made breakfast a very pleasant affair.

We took the U1 subway to Messberg, and then walked south around the edge of the Harbor City to the Speicherstadt and took a look at the old brick warehouses lining the canals there. Many still have the hoists for lifting goods out of the canal boats up into the floors above. But on the warehouses that have been converted into condominiums I suspect those hoists are nowadays just used to haul large, awkward furniture such as sofas or pianos to the upper-level apartments.

From the Speicherstadt area we curled around to "Miniature Land", a curious thing that began in 2000 as a very large HO gauge model train layout created by a couple of model train enthusiasts. But over the intervening years this layout has "grown like Topsy" to become a gargantuan layout covering two floors of one building and the basement of an adjoining one.

We spent about 2 hours looking at the different train layouts including the city of Hamburg, parts of the USA, Scandinavia, and Austria. I was amazed at the airport, because there they had planes taking off and landing, and then taxiing to a gate at a terminal, all with the appropriate sound effects! All of these small things seem quite simple, but a dissassembled model airplane showed how packed with computers, wires, and batteries each small model really is!

I was surprised to see they are starting a whole new section on parts of Italy in the newly-acquired basement of the adjoining warehouse. That new section will even include Rome, which will in fact not be built in a day but rather over a period of about a year on this miniature scale. The Roman Colosseum had already been completed , and I saw that they had many pictures of the "real thing" posted over the layout to help the modeler get all the details right.

After lunch at the cafe in Miniature World, we walked northwards around the old section of the harbor, first stopping at St Katherine's Church. There are five major churches in Hamburg , most of which were damaged during the Allied bombing towards the end of WWII. St Katherine, for example, had lost its old stained-glass window, but had replaced two of them with modern stained-glass ones which I thought were quite pretty.

From St Katherine we meandered around to the Deichstrasse where some of the oldest buildings in Hamburg, storehouses from 1699-1700, were located. There are only about four of those still standing, and they certainly looked old!

By this time we were all getting tired, so we took a direct route up the side of a canal (or more accurately a "Fleet" as it had flowing water) to the Rathausplatz, or City Hall plaza, where we stopped for some ice cream at a kiosk selling gelato. By now the temperature was in the high 80s, so we had to eat our quickly melting gelato before it dripped all over us! So it turned out to be a messy but tasty snack. The Rathausplatz is often used for demonstrations and today there was a group that protested against "Frankencorn - genetically modified corn" even having one person dressed up as an out-of-control, mean-looking corn cob.

Then we ambled over to the Rathaus or City Hall, where we found some fountains just inside the door where we could wash our hands and fill our water bottles. Serendipitously, we caught an English-speaking tour just as they were starting out. Our guide spoke English well, and we enjoyed the beautiful furnishings both on the Parliament side and on the Mayoral side of the building. The Parliament side is used by the Hamburg equivalent of the city council, and the Mayoral side is used for executive functions by the Mayor and his staff.

We ended up in grand ballroom, which nowadays is used more for formal state dinners and gatherings than actual balls. The huge hall is, however, surprisingly beautiful. The walls were covered with huge murals which were at least 25 feet high and depicted the critical scenes of Hamburg's history. The paintings were quite romanticized in a late 1800s fashion, but very pretty.

Crossing the plaza and walking northeast a bit, we next toured the Petrikirche - St Peter's church. I thought it was fine although rather Spartan in appearance, but Monika bemoaned the fact that it had been so ruthlessly modernized during its restoration.

We took some time out in our perambulation around downtown Hamburg to look for shorts for Linda, as she hadn't packed a pair and it was surprisingly hot in Hamburg. Monika helped Linda finally find a decent pair of shorts on sale at our favorite store, Karstadt, for 7 Euro, which was a very good price. Yay Linda!

Heading back to Hauptbahnhof, we had dinner in the food court there, which has quite a variety of tasty offerings. But we were grateful to sit down on the next S1 train back to our hotel in Ohlsdorf for the evening. There we all retreated to our rooms for the night, and Monika and I just collapsed into bed again as we were all still suffering from jet lag.