Hamburg, or My Reckless Adventure in the North

This is my fourth trip to Germany, and it was not until this trip that I had ever been anywhere other than the country's two southernmost states (Bavaria and Baden- Württemburg). In February I went to Berlin with my program, and since then I've been south (Italy), west (Ulm), and east (Prague) but not north. So this past weekend I fixed that problem by taking a little vacation to Hamburg. I call this trip a "reckless adventure" because I went by myself, to visit a guy I barely knew. But, all's well that ends well, and I am now writing this safely back in Regensburg, not having had my skin made into furniture Silence of the Lamb-style or axe-murdered or come to any other of the horrible endings that my mother (and my friend Jarell) were envisioning in my future. In fact, the supposed 'axe murderer' showed me quite a bit of the city, and I kind of enjoyed the sort of bizarre girlfriendish role I took up over the weekend. I even went with him to buy his mother a birthday present. (Which, as it turns out, was a gift certificate to a drugstore, making me pretty glad this was just a weekend thing.)

Following a two hour delay due to a fallen tree on the train tracks, I arrived in Hamburg at 8pm on Thursday night and was picked up by André at the station. He gave me a mini-tour of the city, taking me to a memorial bombed-out church from World War II (surprisingly romantic at sunset) and across a few of the main canals downtown, and ending at the very impressive town hall (Rathaus) square, where we swan-gazed at the harbor. 

He had work on Friday, so I had the whole day gloriously to myself. It might sound strange, but I seriously enjoy sight-seeing alone. It's nice not having to cater to anyone else's touristy desires, and instead have the opportunity to spend however long I like at the famous art museum (45 minutes, I seriously can't look at art for that long before it all starts to look the same) and however long I like strolling through the downtown shopping area (two hours, going into stores whenever it started pouring) and however long I like attempting to locate a café I wanted to go to from my guidebook (half the afternoon) and however long I like sitting in said café reading (the other half of the afternoon). Give me a a good map, a bottle of water, my chapstick and an umbrella, and I am in my element, ready to go. 

That evening we drove down the harbor and walked through the Elbtunnel, which is exactly what it sounds like: a tunnel that runs under the Elbe river. We took some photos of the city from the other side, and then headed back home to meet up with some of André's friends for the night. And by night, I mean literally the whole entire night. We hung out and got to know each other (I was lucky, not everyone was acquainted so I fit right in) for a while, and I tried an energy drink for the first time in my life (which will also be the last time in my life). I'm fairly certain the main ingredient in those is poison, or at least sugar-flavored gasoline. We then went downtown to the Reeperbahn Straße (aka Red Light District) for a night on the town. I would have been very alarmed by this, except that I had already read in my guidebook that the fun bars and clubs of Hamburg also happen to be located in said District. Three bars and several hours later, it was four am and the sun was rising. Literally, the sun was rising. For someone who has never experienced this, it was mind-boggling. Hamburg is the farthest north I've ever been (it's even more northern than Beijing!) and I was shocked to see for myself that the sun actually sets there just before eleven pm and rises in the wee hours of what can barely be called "morning." Anyway, four am found us along one of the streets lined with prostitutes. No way to sugar-coat that one. This also might have alarmed me in normal life, but prostitution happens to be quite a legal trade in this country. Having never actually seen a prostitute (much less an entire block lined with them) I was mostly fascinated by the whole thing, when I wasn't busy trying not to look disgusted. In a somewhat hilarious and utterly bizarre encounter, our group of four men and me (the other couple had checked out early) was stopped halfway down the block by another group, this one of four respectable-looking ladies in their late fifties who offered to pay the men in our group for their services. This produced a variety of reactions among my new friends (none of them overly favorable) and a big laugh all around once it was established that they were completely joking. 

Luckily, this street (and thus the awkward conversation about older women) abruptly ended with a Burger King, where we struggled to find an empty table at six am. An hour later, we were finally home, dizzy with exhaustion (or alcohol, but for me it was just exhaustion). That afternoon (after a weird morning of sleeping, I never do that kind of thing) André and I drove to Lübeck, the medieval city where he studied engineering. I wasn't too excited to see it, because let's face it--I've seen a lot of medieval cities in my five trips to Europe. I have to laugh at myself for saying that, partially because it sounds so pretentious and partially because I was so off the mark about Lübeck. What a cool city! It's nothing like the medieval city I live in now. For one, it has water everywhere in the form of lakes and rivers. The architecture is also different in the north, but in a way that I'm not going to try to describe because I don't know any of the proper terms in which to do so. That's something I should maybe learn. . .

By the end of our sight-seeing afternoon/evening, neither of us could keep our eyes open. Except, apparently, to watch two hours of a completely enbrain-cell-leaching German  game show (a genre of television programming unfortunately not unique to the US and Japan, it seems) in which celebrities have to place bets on whether or not "talented" people can pull off seemingly-impossible stunts ("Can this man unhook twenty-five women's bras in three minutes... with chopsticks?" "Can this eighty-pound Chinese woman hula-hoop forty pounds worth of metal hoops for fifteen seconds?"). If they lose the bet, they have to complete a ridiculous task in front of a live audience of thousands (Germany's leading comedian having to ride across the Majorcan football stadium on a donkey, for example, or Germany's Next Top Model winner having to perform a Flamenco dance with only ten minutes of instruction). At the end, the audience phones in to vote on who's crazy talent was the best, and that person wins like an Audi or something. Incidentally, it was the Chinese woman who won. And I understood her thank-you speech, to my utmost delight. 

On Sunday morning we woke up early to go to the famous fish market, a market which has taken place every Sunday morning in Hamburg at the harbor for something like five hundred years. I didn't buy any fish, but I did smell some. Then it was time for my train ride back to Regensburg and the reality of a German linguistics midterm looming in my future. Future = tomorrow. Time to study. . .