Hamburg

View Larger Map

A Bullet Train.

Then it was on to a bullet train and our destination was Hamburg. There was a really nice lady who sat across from as and chatted with us most of the way. She kept trying to give us things like some juice or a sandwich and when we arrived in Hamburg she made it her duty to make sure we found the Information Center. She was an oldish lady and had been in Berlin around the wartime and it was really interesting talking to her. She even gave us a departing gift of a block of chocolate. We only arrived at about 5pm but the sun was long gone! Travelling in Germany in winter is not all bells and whistles. Its great in the fact that there aren’t many tourists but at the same time there is hardly any day at all. The sun seems to rise at about 0830 and sets about 1600, 1630 if you’re lucky, and the sun only decides to poke its head out of the clouds once every 2 days.

We were planning to leave quite early in the morning to try and go to Dresden and then on to Nürnberg on the same day, so we pretty much had the night to do Hamburg. We checked into our Hostel, got rid of our bags and then we were off. Hamburg is a beautiful city and seeing it all at night didn’t really do it justice. About half of the city was demolished during World War II and has since been rebuilt. The city is a large harbour port and has many canals running through it.

We first saw a statue which was a Bismarck Memorial. It is dedicated to Otto von Bismarck who was the Prime Minister of Prussia and the first Chancellor of the German Empire. It is the largest and probably most well-known memorial to Bismarck world-wide

Bismarck Memorial.

From there we went on to see the St. Michaelis-Kirche church, which is one of Germany’s foremost protestant church and is very impressive. It was first built in 1648-69 but in 1750 lightening struck the church and burnt it to the ground and it was built again between 1751-62. It was burnt down again in 1906 and again rebuilt and was also struck several times during WWII. (This church does not have much luck!!!!) We would have liked to go inside but I think it is only open to the public during the day and also there was a concert on when we were there.

St. Michaelis Church

From there we had a wander around and after getting lost and walking in circles we stumbled into the alley way Kramer-Amt-Stuben which had a couple of nice old buildings and restaurants.

Kramer-Amt-Stuben

Kramer-Amt-Stuben

We made our way down to the Harbour, on the way passing alongside canals. We read that there are more bridges here than in Venice! It was freezing walking along the harbour but it was a nice walk as there were some amazing ships to look at along the way.



We made our way to the Elbtunnel, which was my favourite attraction in Hamburg. Construction commenced in 1907 and was finished in 1911.



It is a tunnel under the water to the opposite shore of the Elbe River and is for pedestrians and registered vehicles. The cars are taken into a lift and lowered into the tunnel and then hoisted up again at the opposite end.

Entrance and exit of the car lifts on the opposite side of the river.

The car lifts

It is 426.5m long and at a depth of 23.5m. We went at night and wondered how safe it was because anything can happen down there and no one will know...
You can either take a lift or stairs down but we decided to take the stairs down - Alisa thought it was scary because they were renovating one section and all the stairs leading down were boarded up and looked shabby.



There were lots of other people around so it was fine and we walked along and back. There were also lots of people biking across even at 11 o’clock at night.



One thing we have really noticed about Germans is their love for bikes. And they all have bells on them to warn you to get out of their way. And no one seems to wear a helmet? Coming from NZ where it is illegal not to it was weird for us to see. A lot of the footpaths actually have separate bike lines. In flat cities like Frankfurt I can see the advantage in this but I wouldn’t want to do it in Istanbul! Alisa seemed to really like the little cobbled roads everywhere and nice big open spaces. I, on the other hand, really enjoyed the Canals.



After the Elbtunnel we went into town. The first thing we saw was the Town Hall or “Rathaus”. This is a huge and beautiful building and was built from 1886-1897. Because it was night we weren’t able to go in it but apparently it has 647 rooms (6 more than Buckingham Palace).



By this time we were starting to get tired so we walked and had a look at two near-by churches. St. Petri was completely covered as it was being restored but St. Jacobi was impressive to look at. The two were very similar in shape and size. St. Petri is the oldest parish church founded in the 11th century. The bell tower is 132m high.



St. Jacob was founded in 13th century.



From there we went to look at St. Katharinen church.



And then finally to St. Nikolai’s church. It was destroyed during WWII, by a firestorm in 1943, and the ruins of the spire are left standing as a memorial for victims of the war, violence and persecution. It was a pity it was night because we couldn’t go into any of them and the photos didn’t come out too well.

The next morning it was up early and we went to take a couple of quick photos of the Town Hall and then made our way to the train station.



Unfortunately we missed the train to Dresden and after some deliberating we decided to skip it and made our way straight to Nürnberg. Unfortunately as much as we would like to we couldn’t see everything we wanted to in just a week. So it was on the train again arriving in Nürnberg 4 hours later.