Hamburg Unexpurgated

It’s hard to know where to begin recounting our long weekend in Hamburg without being redundant; without describing an infernally long tour bus ride that began at a way-too early hour of this past Saturday morning that involved some amount of rain. The difference between this trip and the last one to Weimar, however, is that Hamburg was entirely worth it. As one would like to do in real life, I’ll skip the bus ride part and get straight to the city.

Since it’s such a long way (about an 8 hour drive), we got in around 3 in the afternoon. Our first stop was St. Nikolai’s church, the building of which was completed in 1874 in Gothic revival architectural style (so it looks a lot older than it is), and then bombed during an air raid in World War II. Rather than having been rebuilt and restored like so many others, what is left of the church after the bombing remains in ruins in the middle of the city. The result is really spectacular—a traditional religious space turned secular war memorial, rain falling into it. It’s kind of sculptural mise-en-abyme, also, having become a place for other very beautiful works of public art.

Next we checked out the Rathaus of Hamburg. It’s kind of an awesome building and still functions as the seat of government for the city. Then we walked around the canals in the downtown a bit before checking into our hostel.

The place where we stayed is called Meininger hostel, which I actually want to take a minute to recommend. After having slept in at least one if not two completely awful places last year while traveling with my sister, this place was comparatively great—it wasn’t too remotely located, the rooms were very clean and new, breakfast was included in the price, and towels were available for free at the desk (in a lot of places you have to either rent one or bring your own, which (unsurprisingly) I forgot to do). It doesn't have the personality of the smaller hostels, but it's a pretty decent stand-by for comfort/cleanliness in a lot of the bigger cities in Europe. We dropped off our things and went out again to see what there is to do in Hamburg.

Of course, there's everything to do! It was Saturday night on Halloween weekend in Germany’s second most populated city that is also home to the notorious St. Pauli red-light district. The city is apparently full of great bars—we went to a sofa lounge called Zoe’s where we tried the local beer, Astra (it was decent but I have a general complaint about the hype surrounding German beer that I’ll save for a later post), and another place called Rosie’s, which served very cheap drinks and played an amazing mix of 60s soul music.

Appropriately buzzed, we went to see if St. Pauli could live up to its reputation. And disappointingly, I don’t actually know. The pictures here are of Reeperbahnstrasse and Grosse Freiheit (fantastically translating to “Great Freedom”) but apparently the majority of bordellos are located on Herbertstrasse, where it’s completely verboten for any woman (who is not a prostitute) to set foot. According to one guide book, women who have gone on Herbertstrasse have had verbal abuse and buckets of beer or urine thrown upon them. This isn’t how it works in Amsterdam, where (at least in my experience there) anyone who wants to see what's happening can. It’s just such a weird and seemingly out-of-date prohibition that I have no idea what it means, no idea how to engage with it. So I didn't. Limited as our voyeurism was, we walked around a bit and had the icky, ambivalent feeling that legalized prostitution tends to leave behind in a person. Then we went to a pretty ordinary bar/dance club on Reeperbahn and ended our night around 3am—not nearly late enough, however, to keep up with the Hamburgers, who smoothly transition from the night clubs to the Fish Market, which opens between 5 and 6 in the morning on Sundays to feed disheveled partiers. Instead, we went back to the Hostel for about 4 hours of sleep before making our way there.

The fish market is the best! If you’ve been to Pike’s Place in Seattle, it’s quite similar to that—except that Hamburg’s Fish Market is about 3 times the size, and they don’t sell coffee as much as they do beer—lots and lots of it to all the Germans continuing or just starting to party in the early morning. We took these pictures around 9am to the sounds of an American rock music cover band doing Steppenwolf and Green Day:

After the Fish Market we took a boat ride tour of the harbor on the Elbe, which is so big it seems like the ocean. I think the pictures mostly speak for themselves, except that it’s so interesting how exciting and aesthetically pleasing industry and shipping are to pretty much everyone. And seeing really, impossibly big stuff, like cranes that can move 3-times-Titantic-sized ships. Why do we like this? We really do.

Hauptkirche St. Michaelis was next. I am beginning to understand why people say they’re over the churches of Europe and don’t really care much about seeing another one—sightseeing in some cities is almost exclusively comprised of visiting Big Impressive Church after Big Impressive Church. Who knows how long this will last, but I’m still really impressed. What was so awesome about St. Michaelis, however, wasn’t really the church itself. The inside of it is gaudy and looks like a theater in a Rococo-ish palace. And the architecture is not as awesome as that of bombed St. Nikolai’s. But we were able to climb the stairs to the top of St Michaelis’s, which gave a nice (if foggy) view of the city. And on the way down the bells in the tower started ringing—of course, this must happen, well, at least every hour of the day, but it seemed especially lucky to experience it. Passing within 3 feet of the enormous bells was an event for the entire body—you could feel the sound vibrating at the very center of your chest and stomach, and left you feeling shaky afterward for a good ten minutes. It was a completely awesome sound experience that was, gratefully, totally beyond photography.

After St. Michaelis and a coffee break to get out of the rain, we went to the Kunsthalle, which is far too big to have covered in the amount of time we had to spend there—it’s actually two enormous buildings that are connected by an underground tunnel, an entire wing of which is dedicated to contemporary art. We saw mostly the old stuff, though, and some really fantastic 19th and 20th century pieces—particular favorites were Paul Klee’s Revolution des Viadukts, Edward Munch’s Madonna, and a lot of great pieces by Emil Nolde, whose work I hadn’t seen much of before.

That was pretty much the end of the day, as well as our time in Hamburg. Unable to rally for more drinking and St Pauli debauchery, we settled for pizza.

The next morning, we left for Luebeck.