Hamburg!!!!

YAY! I get to be new and different and not even *mention* the P-city like all the other recent blogs, hehehehe (this is Rebecca thumbing her nose at all of you!) ;) Well, I slept all of Satuday, which was nice since it is my personaly philosophy that sleep or jumping jacks will cure most anything. I had/still-am-sorta-congested a cold and so sleep is just the trick to cure that! Then on Sunday and Monday I trundled off to Hamburg to see this Northern Hanseatic Must-See-If-You-Are-Germany (or so I was told) city. I agree. I loved Hamburg, maybe it's my green thumb and the fact that they have a huge planted garden in the middle of the city. Or it could be that I love European cathedrals and they have a Baroque cathedral that is amazing! (And a refreshing and surprising change from the usual Gothic or Romanesque styles.) They also have a church that was ruined in WWII and which they are deliberately not restoring as a tribute to the beating that Hamburg took. It was weird reading the history of that church in the underground exibition. You find lines like: "Hamburg was heavily bombed in WWII by the Allies, but the Germans do not find this odd since they have a saying 'Whoever sows wind will reap a storm.' It's weird because in our history we have always been the good guys and so any damage or deaths or anything that happened to the US (take Pearl Harbour, for instance) was wrong and "They wronged us by doing it." and "We were never in the wrong." This is not the case for Germans who have to acknowledge that although the Allies killed tons of Germans and flattened cities, it was a necessary step to winning the war and "They were right and we were wrong and so we can't bear them any ill will for dropping tonnes of kilos of bombs on us." Eating crow like that is hard for anyone and I can understand better how that has shaped the psyche of an entire coutry's population. I wonder how the collective culture/mindset of USAmericans would change if they ever had to do something like that. Would they become more pessimistic? less patriotic? less smiley? would their news reports actually have important world-affecting stories instead of the soft personal-interest stories? Can you imagine a world with no hypothetical situations? I can't. Guess I'll never be a historian. :-)