Hamburg, die Hafenstadt

Through the program that I studied with for the semester we traveled as a group on a weeklong excursion first to Hamburg and then to Copenhagen, Denmark. The first three days were spent in Hamburg, which is only an hour and a half away from Berlin by train, and as Germany’s second largest city (after Berlin) and Germany’s largest port city (although, since Germany isn’t exactly surrounded by water, the power of the statistic is questionable) it is a very interesting and busy industrial harbor city.

We arrived Friday March 28 in Hamburg, the harbor city, a little after noon and set off exploring the city. Our hostel was on a hill overlooking the Elbe River, a prime location for seeing the harbor and visiting the sights. We visited St. Nikolai church, a medieval church that was destroyed by Allied bombings during the war and now serves as an anti-war memorial and St. Katherine Church, where Telemann served as music director. We also explored the Spichernstadt, the old part of the city with red brick buildings along water canals that were used for storing the goods brought in on ships during the original days of Hamburg as a harbor town. Did you know that Hamburg actually has more bridges even then in Venice!?! I thought that was pretty interesting.

We met up with our group for a tour of the city at the City Hall. Our historical city tour included a lot that we had just explored on our own, but was supplemented with interesting historical information. Most of the city was destroyed during the Great Fire of 1842, but then most was rebuilt to a functioning state. My favorite part was going in the Elbe tunnel, the two-lane car, bike and pedestrian tunnel running under the Elbe River!

Saturday we visited two museums. The first was the German Toll Museum, which presented both the history of German customs and interesting artifacts to do with customs…I found the various objects that had been used to smuggle all sorts of things into Germany to be particularly interesting! We also went to a spice museum. As a harbor city, Hamburg has a lot of freshly imported spices. What was cool about this museum is that with admission we were given a packet of pepper and then in exploring the museum we were allowed to taste whatever spices we wanted! I thought it was great fun, although by the end, my mouth was quite confused. Saturday evening we went with the group to a modern performance of Orpheus and Eurydice at the Hamburg Chamber Opera. Afterwards, we went to the biannual Hamburg fair-like event that happened to be taking place while we were there!

On Sunday morning we got up early and went to Hamburg’s Fish Market, which the city is very well known for. Later that morning we had a group boat tour of the harbor and were able to see the Spichernstadt from the water, as well as see the new more modern shipping yards and container yards. In the afternoon we went to the Schanzenviertel, a more village-like part of the city with Turkish grocers, pubs and cafes. Then we went to Ohlsdorf, the second largest cemetery in Europe….a weird thing to do, I know, but it is much less a cemetery than it is a park. After a run around the Inner and Outer Alster Lakes downtown, we went to the Reeperbahn, the characteristic street of Hamburg filled with prostitutes, sex shops and bars, and went to a wine bar there for the evening.

I enjoyed the city, but am pretty certain that it is not on the top of my list of places to visit again…

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