Cement towers shield
Living lakes, and people's paths
Can meet in strange ways.
We rolled into Hamburg after a few hours' ride today, and it confused the heck out of us. There didn't seem to be a centre to the city, and it sprawled all over the place with no end in sight. We tooled around for a while, being impressed by a few parks and things we saw, then we got some hamburgers (in Hamburg! Haha, get it!?) for lunch--thanks mostly to the directions afforded us by a pair of university students that we ran into on a streetcorner ("Hallo, sprechen Sie Englisch?" "Yes, of course." "Hi, sorry, we're huge tourists, and we were hoping to have some hamburgers in Hamburg... can you suggest someplace?" "Hahahahahahaha...")--and tried to contact our host here. We managed to borrow a phone off of a guy hanging around the train station (he and his friend were also super nice) and showed up at Wolfgang Krechlok's house 20 minutes later.
He's a super dude. He's a friend of a friend from CERN, and he worked as a physicist at DESY (which is sort of like German CERN, but a little smaller) for many years. He now is the chair of the Green Party in Hamburg, and he explained a lot of interesting things about the greenness of Hamburg. I guess there are guerrilla gardeners afoot who steal public space for making flower gardens and the like. It's illegal, but tolerated. :) There are also bike houses around town, especially in the part of town where Wolfgang lives (it's called Altona, but anyway more on Hamburg history in a moment). They are basically little towers with bike racks inside that are for people whose apartment buildings don't have cellars to use. Such a good idea!
So Hamburg isn't really a town in its own right. It's a conglomeration of towns that have come together over the years to create one big, sprawling harbour along the Elbe. And what a harbour it is. On one side, there are residences and gorgeous parks, and on the other there are industrial landscapes of epic proportion. Cruise ships wander up and down the river, alongside boat busses that operate as part of the Hamburg transit system. Wolfgang took us for a stroll and showed us the Altona fishmarket and downtown and beaches, and it was lovely! Altona is super confusing, though; it has been built on a series of triangles rather than squares, which makes sensible navigation nigh impossible for the uninitiated.
After our stroll, Evan and I headed out to see what the local nightlife had to offer (Saturday night, why not?), and we were pleased to happen upon a bar stuffed with cigarette-smoking, tattooed seamen. Well, some of them were seamen. Or had the muscles for it, anyway. But the guy we wound up talking to for most of the evening was an aspiring musician from near the Dutch border. He was hysterical, and he served as a pretty good translator for us to talk to some of the other folks in the bar, including one old woman who was drunk off her arse and babbling.
All in all, I think Hamburg will be great!