We left by train for Hamburg last Tuesday morning and got there that afternoon. After putting our luggage in our hotel, we boarded a ship and took a tour of the harbor. The weather was cold and partly cloudy but not raining, luckily. First we went around Speicherstadt, an area of the city with lots of canals and old brick warehouses that are now oriental carpet stores, offices, and apartment buildings. We passed by HafenCity, the largest construction site in Europe, an area that will later be lots of ritzy office buildings, but is now filled with cranes and half-completed steel structures.
The tour continued by going out into the industrial part of the harbor. Hamburg is on the river Elbe, which connects to the Atlantic a couple hundred kilometers to the north, and is the second-largest port in Europe behind Rotterdam (and the 9th largest port in the world; the biggest ones are all in East Asia). We saw a lot of shipping containers and a good number of huge, docked container ships. We also passed by floating dry docks, an old Shell oil refinery, and lots of big cranes for loading containers onto ships. Seeing the cranes and ships with their entire hull exposed on the dry docks was particularly impressive. After the tour we had free time, but I didn't go out that night.
Giant cranes on the harbor tourNext, we took a bus tour of Hamburg. We drove through a residential section with lots of nice villas and lakes and parks and then saw the main sights of Hamburg: the Reeperbahn, the main street in Hamburg's red light district, the harborfront, various churches, and the commercial district around the main train station. It was interesting...but being on a warm bus for more than an hour after having two beers meant I feel asleep in the middle! After the tour, I went walking with my friend Mark and a few others. Mark was in search of a school his grandmother attended when she was young as well as the house she was born in. It was a good way to get away from the noisiness of the downtown area and see some of the nice residential sections north of the city.
That evening, we ventured to the Reeperbahn just as it was getting dark and all the lights were coming on. I saw the Beatles plaza, built there because the Beatles, (or at least John, Paul, George, Stu Sutcliffe, Pete Best, and sometimes Ringo) got there start there. They had some silhouette statues and a list of their singles inscribed into the ground. Most of the clubs where they played in the early 60s are gone or have changed names, but I did get to see the Kaiserkeller, still under the same name, but having undergone some reonnovations since the Beatles played there.
Me at the Beatles Plaza
Grosse Freiheit (street where the Beatles played) in Hamburg's Red Light District
Lübecker DomThe entire IES group met up in the afternoon at Buddenbrooks House, now a museum. This is the house Thomas Mann and his family lived in, and Mann named his novel Buddenbrooks after it. The museum is now a Thomas Mann museum, and we got an interesting tour from a professor-like man, who taught us about Thomas Mann's life, his family's history, and a little bit about the book. I have never read any Thomas Mann, so it wasn't very relevant to me, but still interesting. Next we got a brief tour of the Günter Grass House, now a museum and art gallery devoted to Grass, another German author. Once again, I've never read any of his books, but the museum had some of his artwork on display, and that was interesting-- I didn't know he was an artist in addition to a writer. We had some free time afterward, so we walked around a bit more. On the way back to the train station, we got to see the Holstentor, a big, gothic, brick city gate, one of the few remaining signs of the medieval fortifications that used to surround the city.
HolstentorA couple other people and I began an afternoon of walking around the city with a visit to St. Michaelis Church, one of the main landmarks of Hamburg. There are five main protestant churches in Hamburg, but I think St. Michaelis is the most beautiful. It has a giant, copper, baroque steeple, and though most of the back of the church was under construction, it was still a beautiful building. There is a large statue of Martin Luther on one side of the building, and a huge statue over the main entrance of the church- St. Michael's Victory over the Devil. This statue was awesome...take a look:
St. Michael's Victory over the Devil
View of Hamburg from the top of St. Michaelis Church
At the top of St. Michaelis
St. Michaelis Church
Bismarck monumentFinally, we came to the waterfront, and walked around the Speicherstadt a bit as the sun was setting. The long brick warehouses and canals which we had seen briefly from the harbor boat tour were interesting to see on foot.
SpeicherstadtSaturday afternoon I tried to find a supposedly famous erotic art museum in Hamburg; I later found that it had closed a year before, though the website for the museum has no mention of this. I went to the address, a few blocks away from the Reeperbahn, and found a place that claimed to call itself Erotic Art Museum Hamburg. An old man, the proprietor, came out and said, "Do you want to come visit the erotic art museum?" I said yes, and he took me inside. There were a couple other people there already, so he gave his introductory speech..."I am 90 years old and still kicking, people from all over the world have come and visited my museum" etc, etc. He was a little hard of hearing and repeated himself a bit, but after talking he allowed us to walk around his museum. And it was definitely not the erotic art museum I had come to see, you know, the one with Picassos and Renaissance art. It was basically this man's private art gallery. I suppose I should have realized this upon walking into the place, which was covered in these odd collages that he has made over the past 20 or so years, but I thought, well, maybe there's an upstairs or something...no, definitely not. It was very odd, the best way to describe it would be like a roadside attraction in America. He took photographs and newspaper clippings and objects and pasted them together to make collages...I guess you could call some of them "erotic," but more of them had to do with the history of Hamburg. He had a lot of old doors labelled with the addresses of famous places in Hamburg and then decorated them according to their history. He had a Beatles door, for example. All in all, it was kitschy and a bit of a letdown, but the old man was nice and so I signed the guestbook and took a picture with him because he seemed really excited about that.
I still can't find any information about why the museum closed. I asked the man if he knew about another erotic art museum in the area, but he kept on talking about how he "owns the whole thing now" and the city never gives any money to erotic art museums. I think he may have been a little senile or didn't understand what I was asking. The only information I found through some Googling is that the building that used to house the art museum is going to be turned into a Beatles museum eventually. Too bad that wasn't around yet!
Anyways, after that little adventure, I went back to the hotel and hung out for a few more hours or so, and then headed back via train to Freiburg. There is still more to see in Hamburg that I didn't get to: the famous fish market, the town hall, the largest model train museum in the world, a submarine museum, and other parks, churches, and museums. The weather was awful for much of the trip, and I have heard from various sources that Hamburg really is a wonderful city, especially when the weather cooperates. I was still happy to get back to the warmth of southern Germany and the smaller-city life of Freiburg, though.
