My bruises have bruises. I'm blaming the cheerleading. Review writing is a whole lot less dangerous....
My bruises have bruises. I'm blaming the cheerleading. Review writing is a whole lot less dangerous.
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Airbrushed beyond belief to make it look better on paper than it is in real life.
I like cities where the airport is not that far removed from the city centre, so we were off to a flying start in Hamburg when less than half an hour after landing and €20 lighter we found ourselves a our hotel. Hamburg has a whole bunch of hotels and guest houses but we only stayed at one, the Radisson, and it was ok. Expedia and Opodo have good choices if you're choosing to book online (which, when you think about it, really is the only way to do it).
We spent 4 days in the city at the beginning of December, specifically timed to take in the Christmas markets. These take place at a few sites across the city from mid November until Christmas eve. The main ones are very centrally located, on the main squares near the town hall, and around the various city churches, are open from mid morning until almost mid night, 7 days a week. If you've ever taken in a European Xmas Market here in the U.K you'll have a good idea what to expect: stands selling hot food and drinks to warm you up in the biter cold; stalls selling crafty decorations and jewellery; random people selling food to take home with you, like bread and cheese. During my year living in south Germany I went to the many local markets every weekend during the winter, and the only real difference between those and these in the north was the food selection - where in the south you'll find pizzas and bretzels and garlic baguettes as well as the Flammkuchen and sausages, the northern market only had the latter.
Luckily,
eating out in the city in general and near the markets in particular is hardly a chore. Being a large, relatively cosmopolitan city we could choose from almost any country's native dish at any time of day. A little Italian across from the main market had dreadful service but fab food and low prices. The large department stores nearby offered cheap, tasty main meals and snacks for similar prices to a BHS or Littlewoods café, but with much more choice (one had 4 different pastas alone, not to mention the huge salad bars, main course selections, cream cake and pudding desserts and more drinks that certain bars in Manchester).
We went to Hamburg first and foremost to go Christmas market shopping, but having a new city at our feet for a long weekend meant we also had to explore. I wanted to go 'regular' shopping (books, clothes, chocolate etc) so one morning we headed over to the Main station which is at one end of the two principal shopping streets. Here we found everything from H&M to Douglas, C&A (still going strong on the continent), Karstadt, Thalia, Orsay and more. I once wrote about a trip to Rome during which we spent a half day lingerie shopping, and someone commented that they would have better things to do in a city like that than try on underwear. But the black lace numbers we picked up on that trip have garnered so many compliments since then that I couldn't imagine a foreign trip complete without some new undies. In America it was Victoria's Secret, and here it was New Yorker and, interestingly, C&A. That's just me. We popped into the Lego shop to pick up some new Christmas themed bricks and kits, but the service here was typical of the city as a whole: lousy. I've tended to find German shop staff polite and friendly, but the ones in Hamburg were anything but, and reminiscent of the snooty, overly made up ladies usually found on Vienna's Kärntnerstrasse
Of course we couldn't go all that way just to shop, even when return flights are less than £50, so at some point we had to do the sites. These included, in no particular order:
The art gallery over near the train station. Again, the service was nothing to write home about, but we had a wonderful time there thanks to turning up on a Sunday when they old their weekly special from 10am - 2pm. For €20 per person you get entrance to all the art galleries and exhibitions, as many of the guided tours as you want and your pick from an all-you-can-eat brunch buffet with everything from rolls and nutella to soup. It was a good deal since entrance alone is around €10, and breakfast at our hotel would have been an additional €15. Plus it's always nice to be able to say, "Gosh, you haven't ever brunched at a museum? How odd…." The art here was reasonable without being memorable - not the Uffizi by any means, but equally better than what Preston has to offer.
We admired a number of churches from the outside and popped into a few including the St Petrikirche and Michaeliskirche which has a nice observation tower with a lovely lift for getting to the top
Hamburg is a major port, but a lot of the watery atmosphere in the city is provided in fact by the rivers that run through it. Hamburg in fact has more bridges than Venice thanks to this. But we did make our way across town to the port, because you kind of have to say you've seen it. We took an incredibly disappointing
Pictures of Hamburg (Germany)
A picture of what the harbour could theoretically look like. It doesn't.
hour long cruise which came complete with a hard-to-hear German commentary and views of some lovely transport vessels.
Also in the area is the Reeperbahn (the local red light district) and, worryingly, round the corner from this is a rather sweet school museum. Once the woman had got over the shock of us wanting to visit on our own rather than with a school group we were waved up the stairs to the 4 rooms of exhibits dating from my grandparents' school days onwards. Small but sweet, and free so definitely worth seeing.
The Speicherstadt warehouse district is just a short distance along the road from here, and that's where you'll find the toll museum and, well, a lot of warehouses. It's a strange little world where Germany takes up half the planet and America and Australia stand side by side, but that's the world you'll find at the Miniature Wonderland, also located in the warehouse district. This is the world's largest model railway (it's truly huge) which has trains running around various countries all in the same room. The only downside to this was their constant thirst for night/day contrasts which lead to them switching off the lights every ten minutes or so so you could see the worlds all lit up in the dark. The first time it was nice to see, but the second and third times we were just waiting for the to switch them back on so we could resume looking at whatever section we were on at that moment.
Right next door was the Hamburg Dungeon which, though operated by the same people as the London version, was nothing like I remember that being. Instead, this was a 90 minute guided tour through Hamburg's past complete with rotting corpses, evil characters, a fake boat ride, a real boat ride and a lot of heavily accented German - not really worth a visit if you're not a native. This and the miniature wonderland were both on the cheap side of expensive: about £8 - 9 per adult, with minimal student discounts.
Our last exhibition based excursion was to the Communications Museum near our hotel which was the worst excuse for a museum I have ever seen. Entrance was only a couple of Euros, but it was so appalling that even that seemed a rip off - one room of displays about messages in bottles and one on random bits of 'communication inspired art' were all there was to see.
Hamburg is big on musicals. We didn't go and see one, but we did make it to the cinema twice. Prices are similar to England although they have that horrible German habit of charging you extra for long-running films - as if it's your fault the Phantom screenwriter got so carried away.
Air Berlin fly to Hamburg from Manchester for around £45 including taxes. There is no direct train link to the airport, but you can catch a train then a bus, or a bus direct (for twice the price) or a taxi - about the same per person as that bus, and much comfier. Hamburg is easy to explore by foot, through there is a good underground system that costs just €1.05 per standard trip.
Hamburg seemed very ordinary to me. The differences between northern and southern Germany are not as severe as those between northern and southern Italy, but Hamburg at least seemed rather industrial and ugly. Maybe I'm becoming old and cynical, or have just been overdoing the city breaks, but compared to all the other places I've been in the last 4 years (Paris, Rome, Pisa, Florence, Berlin, Bonn, Munich, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Vienna, Bratislava, Brno, Gdansk, Chicago, D.C., New York, Atlanta, Dublin) Hamburg's like Baltimore and Malta: not even on my to-revisit-one-day-if-I-have-nothing-better-to-do list.
I'm glad we went, but that's about it. When the highlight of your trip is finding a Penny Markt (home to the cheapest Milka known to man, and one of my former favourite supermarkets) you know there's something wrong. In general the attitude of the local put us off: the tourist info office seemed annoyed we dared ask them a question (in German…), various shop staff seemed to think they were somehow far superior to the people whose business was keeping them in their job and museum staff made you feel like you'd disturbed them immensely when you dared approach them to, oh, pay an entrance fee or purchase an item from their sub-standard over-priced typical museum shop. When there are so many other fab places to visit, an experience like this seems a good warning not to waste precious time in that area of the country again.
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Jan 1st, 2005
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