So our stop this week brings us North of Berlin to Hamburg. Possibly the windiest and rainiest city in Germany. So it rained from the moment we stepped off the train until we arrived back in Berlin on Sunday. Hamburg is pretty awesome though. Expensive. But awesome. Hamburg is really cool that in its lower district called Hafen City (Harbor City) is being completely redesigned and an entirely new city is being built there. The whole area is under construction. Its quite cool to see a city actually being built. It makes me think how people felt when New York or Boston was built up. It's going to be finished in 2030 so I'm already planing a return trip. We walked for two and half hours probably more in the pouring rain just to see the proposed sites of all of these buildings and a few that were under construction or already finished. The Elfphilharmonie is probably the most interesting building in the whole design. It's a huge opera house with a hotel apartments and a mall. The design is so sick. I can't even explain it so just google it, it's a masterpiece of engineering.
Now lets get to the real part of this story the nightlife in Hamburg. So finally we completed our search for German food, since apparently Berlin has food from everywhere but Germany. So we walked into this seemingly little stone bar but little couldn't have been more wrong. Probably 100 meters deep this place was just lined with picnic benches filled with people all drinking beer and singing beer songs. Heaven? Maybe. We were seated toward the back where we promptly ordered drinks. They brought us a small 10L keg which was filled with beer brewed in the restaurant. Heaven? Maybe. The guy brought out a steak and a hammer and physically tapped the keg in front of us. Then the waitress comes and the menu has 3 items. A German buffet, a sausage platter, or an assorted German meat dish. Heaven? Yes, yes I think so. The food was delicious and the beer was better and we left quite satisfied.
The next night our exploits got even more local. Hamburg is famous for the Reeperbahn. The Reeperbahn is a famous redlight district in Hamburg. An it lived up to the hype. The establishments on the street are as follows: Casino, Strip Club, Bar, Sex Shop, Nightclub, or any combination of the five for the entirety of the 1/2 KM long block. It was slightly overwhelming and the amount of people there was incredible. It was what I imagine the strip in Las Vegas to be like. Any bar we went to on the strip or down a side street had girls dancing on the bar (fully clothed thank God or I'd have an angry miss Erica). The other crazy thing that happened the night before whilst looking for a bar was getting screamed at by a hooker. Which apparently when a girl just hanging out by herself with an umbrella is a signal for "I'm Working." So she's something to us in German and starts walking towards us so we pick up the pace and start saying "Nein Danke" over and over.
Craziness ensued the whole weekend between kids throwing up in front of me on the train, scary hookers, and pouring rain coming back to normally crazy Berlin seemed like a nice change of pace.
But Hamburg is definitely worth going back to when Hafen City is finished... preferably in August when it's not rainy.
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