Hamburg

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Here in Hamburg, they have a special name for their special weather. Schmuttelvetter. Even if you know no German, it works as an onomatopoeia to tell you what it´s like; grey, cool, air full of drifting drizzle that slowly soaks you without you knowing it. We arrived here night before last, after a late night short haul from Berlin, where we were supposed to stay. Since the only train we could catch was an Inter City Express (ICE TRAIN!), it was going to be really expensive, so we decided to use a day of travel on our rail pass. So we got in around twelve thirty (they say zero thirty here) and caught a cab to our hostel, then crashed dead.

Here´s the thing with overnight trains. If you arrive after midnight, you mark down the date of the day in which you arrive; we arrived half an hour after the ninth started, so that´s the day we marked down. So yesterday we decided to make full use of our day of travel. We caught a train around ten to our first stop, Luneborg.

Luneborg is a very old town. The centre has a bunch of cool old buildings, made cooler for a few reasons. When they were building the place, they got the mortar all wrong, so the walls have tended towards warping and shifting. And the extensive salt mining has caused the ground to shift under the buildings, so that also has had an impact. The end result is a subtle wrongness almost everywhere...not enough to be ridiculous, but enough to make you laugh. Like, you look down a street, and nothing is quite parallel or perpendicular. Very odd. There´s a huge church spire that towers above the centre, and it´s two and a half metres off at the top. It doesn´t look like it´s about to topple or anything, but it´s all very strange.

The strangest was Sanktmikaelskirche, a large cathedral from 1400. It´s red brick, with tall narrow windows. Looks normal enough, for an old church, until you get inside. There are massive columns holding up the vaulted ceiling, and all of them lean visibly, the same way, but not at the same angle. The whole space is off, the eye doesn´t rest anywhere comfortably. You look from place to place and nothing is right. It´s all...skewed. And it´s a very big church.

Soon after that we caught a train back to Hamburg, to catch another train, to Bremen. Bremen is an old town as well, but bigger. You´d call it a city*. We got some lunch there around two (we starving) and looked at some shops. I bought a cool shirt. Then we saw some of the old buildings. There´s a square bordered on all sides by these magnificent old structures, the old town hall and dutch´s palace...reálly cool stuff. Then the night before caught up with us (we´d been up till two) and we went back to the Hauptbahnhof to catch a train back to Hamburg. Then we went to sleep.

This morning Kathleena wasn´t feeling well, so I went out on my own to see a bit of the town. It was between ten thirty and one thirty, so when I first went out, nowhere was open. I went down through St Pauli´s, a really cool neighbourhood, to the Reeperbahn, which is the largest red light district in Europe. There´s sex shops and strip clubs everywhere; the brothels are on side streets. It´s a strange sight in the grey light of midmorning, people bustling by to their jobs, some people sitting around drinking from bottles of beer. I turned back about then, stopped in a secondhand cd store on the way. Bought an album by an old German band I´d heard of.

After that Kathleena and I went out for lunch. They chilly greyness drove us to soup, thick pureed soup from a hip looking place on a shop-lined street. It´s cool here. I mean the places I´ve been so far, they seem pretty hip, but there´s also a pretty relaxed vibe, like nobody´s trying too hard. After lunch I found KRAFTWERK´S FIRST ALBUM. It was expensive, so I´ve exhausted my cd budget for the time being. But that´s okay. I´ve been on the hunt for it forever, and now it´s mine. Finally I´m rid of the chagrin that has filled my soul since that important day at the CD Trader in Brentwood. I was younger. Kraftwerk´s first two albums were there. "I´ll get this one now," I thought, picking up their second one, mistaking it for their first, "and come back for the other one some time. Who else would buy it but me?" Had I only known. I´m too thrifty for my own good sometimes.

Tomorrow we leave for Berlin, and this time we´ll stay there!

*though I find most cities seem bigger than they are here in Europe. Like Munich, it only has thirty percent more people than Calgary, but the infrastructure is about 5 000 percent more extensive; you look at a transit diagram and the different subway lines and trams dazzle the eye, and boggle the mind. At first. And a town of 7 700 like Luneborg has shops and cafes and bustle and busyness that is lacked by towns of that size in Canada.

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