Deluge

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If anything, I thought Hamburg would be interesting. Perhaps a bit grimy, a little sad, some kind of sordid, with all the prostitutes on the Reeperbahn, the immigrants, the slightly desperate reminders that the Beatles got their start here 50 nearly years ago. No one told me that Hamburg is absolutely beautiful.
It’s a watery sort of place, to begin with—endless canals and fleets and waterways, and the harbor and the Elbe and the sea. And, in September, the rain. The sky clouds up, the clouds go dark, the rain pours. Tourists huddle with locals under any available shelter and joke about the weather, and in a few minutes it lets up. The first brave souls ventures out and when she doesn’t melt, the rest of us follow, keeping our umbrellas close at hand.

In a deluge in Hafenstadt, where a completely new residential city is being built where derelict dockyards stood till very recently, I waited out a heavy shower with a Japanese couple and a man who looked like a local worker. When the rain let up a bit, he stepped out from our overhang, looked up at the sky, then said, “That’s not so bad, not at all,” and took off at a trot.

The sky was blue again within ten minutes, and I continued my open-mouthed wandering through an area that will house 40,000 residents by 2025.

I walked back toward the Altstadt, which has been destroyed so often by fire and war that it’s not even that alt, watching men in red-brick warehouses along one of the canals of Speicherstadt haul up loads of Iranian carpets, and even little motorscooters, with old-fashioned ropes and winches. My goal was the skeletal ruin of the St Nicolai Church. The blackened tower was left standing, as a reminder of the terrible war that left much of Germany in ruins.

Before I reached St Nicolai, it rained again—just a brief shower. I joined five or six others in the entrance to a bank.

At the first break in the clouds, a woman wheeled her bicycle out into the open, then mounted and took off, passing a group of tourists riding Segways in the opposite direction.

I stepped out, looked up at the sky, and thought it wasn’t so bad, not at all.

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Photos

St Nicolai
St Nicolai Church memorial at sunset.

Comments

[dave]

having fun yet
Sounds like you are having fun.