As promised, I’m finally going to write about my trip to Hamburg. As I mentioned earlier, Jonathan and I decided to go to Hamburg last Tuesday to take advantage of our semester tickets which allow us to ride the train around most of Niedersachsen (the state or province or whatever you would like to call it that we live in) for free. We left Oldenburg fairly early. We had to change trains in Bremen, then we arrived in Hamburg at about noon or so.
We had talked before the trip and came up with a few places that we wanted to see while in Hamburg. On our list were mostly tourist kind of things such as seeing the town hall which is a beautiful 19th century building that is absolutely enormous. The first thing we did when we arrived was we bought a map of the city. After wandering around the train station trying to figure out where we needed to exit and even stopping at the tourist office to ask (the guy was rude and hardly helped at all), we finally just chose a direction and went. Fortunately for us, it was the right direction. We headed off towards the town hall.
After wandering around it and through it and taking several pictures of it, we decided to head to the Portuguese district since Jonathan wanted to see it. We were going to just walk there, but it was quite a distance from the town hall, so we decided just to buy day tickets to the subway. After getting off the subway, we first got something to eat at a small Bratwurst stand, then we wandered down one street of the Portuguese district. It was quite disappointing.
This time of year is definitely not tourist season. It was gray and cloudy and it started to rain as we were walking back to the subway from the Portuguese district. We continued down the subway to another part of the city that Jonathan wanted to see called St. Pauli. Since Jonathan is very much interested in soccer, he wanted to visit the district because of its soccer team. After walking out of the subway, we tried to find the stadium, but managed to find ourselves on the Reeperbahn which is the red light district and is a street that is directly next to the subway station. We eventually stopped at a pharmacy to ask for directions to the stadium (a pharmacy was the best choice given the other shops on that street). We then headed directly to the stadium where we looked around for a short while and even went through the shop there. From there, we headed back to the subway and back towards the town hall.
Once we reached the town hall again, we went towards a street with lots of shops that is right off the square in front of the town hall. We walked down that for a while and then decided to eat dinner at McDonald’s there. After eating dinner, we were out of things to do. We had seen everything we had come to see, but felt we should still stay longer since it was still light out. We went one of several maps posted for tourists along the streets that show where you are in the city and where a lot of the landmarks and tourist areas are. We decided to go see a street that looked quite interesting with some interesting architecture, so we got back on the subway and headed that way.
We wandered around again for a short while looking for the street after getting off the subway. Once we found the street, it was extremely disappointing. It was only 5 or 6 tall 18th century buildings adjourning each other and nothing else. At the end of the street was a canal that was part of the river with a pedestrian bridge that we decided to go across. On the bridge I saw the tower of a cathedral that I had forgotten was there in Hamburg. It was destroyed during WWII and I knew about it because my German professor at the University of Wyoming had shown our class slides of Hamburg that he took in 1961 or 1962 (I don’t remember exactly) and the cathedral took up several slides. We decided to head in that direction and look at it for ourselves. It was a lot more cleaned up than it had looked in the slides from the 1960’s, but it was still really interesting to see. I of course took a lot of photos of it.
After the cathedral, we wandered around for a while longer, then headed to a bar. After spending some time there, we went back to the main train station and headed home.
