I arrived in Hamburg after a delayed flight from Copenhagen late on Thursday afternoon. It was nice to fly in over the city and see all the familiar sights again. This is my third time in Hamburg.. I just keep coming back! Everytime I come here it is like rediscovering the city again... I have been here in Winter, Spring and now Autumn - and the city is a different landscape each time. I met up with Christina at the airport. She and I met when I came to Hamburg as an exchange student back in 1993. We have kept in [View Full Entry]

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More friends!!! Manu and Hanna made the longest trip for our wedding last year, and we were honored! Their place in Hamburg was beautiful. We played while they were at work (I know, everybody's working while we're playing). We hope they don't notice all the cups and silverware we took! KT and I tried to start an exercise routine by walking/jogging around the beautiful lake around Manu and Hanna's place. We were so sore after the 8k loop, we promptly took 5 days off! I guess we'll give exercise some rest for now. We were also lucky enough to celebrate Manu's [View Full Entry]

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So last Monday, Nick asked us what we were doing for the weekend, no one had any plans so he suggests we go to Hamburg Germany! It was very last minute but the best way we could have planned such a trip. Nick and Becky had already been to Germany, so they were semi-familiar with it, and Nick speaks some German so he helped us out a lot. The trip there consisted of a train ride, plane ride, and two bus rides, it took a while but it was pretty cheap. Once we got there we wandered around asking for directions [View Full Entry]

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We were already docked at the Hamburg cruise ship terminal when we woke up. It was another beautiful, sunny day, but cooler in the upper 50’s. Billy and I stopped up at the Windjammer Café for breakfast, where Susanna trapped his thumbs under a full glass of orange juice, so she could feed him. We hopped on the $5.00 USD cruise ship shuttle that dropped us off in front of the main town square. Our intent was to catch the double-decker bus tour in English, to tour the city. However, we found out that out of the bus tours that run [View Full Entry]

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Me and Olivia just got a ride from Raststätte Stillhorn in Hamburg and now we're on the Autobahn going 160 km/h. It's friggin' crazy! Really feels like we're in some kind of race. Crazy fun. We were actually thinking about heading to Bremen and then onward but this guy stopping was going to Hannover so we might as well tag along. The weather is pretty gray, cloudy and rainy. :/ [View Full Entry]

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My last trip in Germany before heading back home to Finland. So this time I update my Travelblog right after the trip. Unusual, I know, but I bet a nice surprise too! The travels that I still haven't updated here will be written to Travelblog some time soon... Target: Hamburg & Lübeck in northern Germany! I travelled with my Erasmus friends Christina, Daniela and Francesco. Christina is an Erasmus student from Bordeaux but is a German. Daniela comes from Portugal and Francesco from Italy. I...well you know where I come from! This trip was a surprise trip. We "planned" [View Full Entry]

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Turns out to be bloody hard. Its 97km by autobahn from bremen to Hamburg, 150km by the bike route, what they don't tell you is that half that route will be unsealed tracks between feilds as you are led between every small, identical town along the way... this can be a little frustrating, like when I had been biking for over an hour, covered 20km of some rough ground after leavinf Zeven, where I had stayed overnight, and came across an intersection between my route and another path to Zeven, distance 8km... but then, that might not have really been 8km... [View Full Entry]

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I took the train from Wedel to the centre of Hamburg with Elke and Kirsten to do some sightseeing. But firstly, the run down on Hamburg... or rather the “Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg” if you want the official title. Hamburg is the second largest city in Germany and is also it’s own state. Hamburg it seems to me as a city is very understated and as a result it constantly surprises you. The character of the place is a bit like the billionaire who still shines his own shoes; out of the ordinary but still down to earth. The [View Full Entry]

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In this post, I’ll be visiting the heritage from the German side of my family. I was born in South Africa to a German mother and an Australian father. Living in Australia makes my Australian heritage easy to see, and with visit, the German side of the story is filled in. I took the ferry across the river Elbe to Wedel and was greeted by Tante Elke who is effectively a grandmother to me. We made a brief visit to her house where I dropped off my things and we each enjoyed a glass of champagne while catching up on family [View Full Entry]

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The trip to Hamburg involved our first experience travelling on a high speed train. In this case we were travelling on a high speed ICE train. The person at Heidelberg station recommended we book a seat as it might be full. We did this and ended up with our own 6 seat compartment to ourselves as the train wasn't full at all. Kerrie liked this as it meant she could not only listen to the Ipod but sing to the music as well. (The experience was therefore not quite so good for Ross.) Hamburg had probably the most impressive railway station [View Full Entry]

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