36 hours in Hamburg.

Departing from Norddeich Mole on Friday afternoon, Meredith, Mikaela, Caleb, Mario, and me were all headed to Hamburg for the weekend. It’s second only to Berlin in size and population, making it a little foreboding to approach in just a day and a half, but we went about it and succeeded if you ask me. Our hostel was right next to the hauptbahnhof, so we set down our bags immediately and took advantage of the free wifi after being away from major civilization for a couple of days, while we waited to get checked in. When we saw the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games playing in the bar of the hostel, we decided to sit down and cheer of Team USA as they marched into the arena in London. Finally we got to bed and in what seemed like 5 minutes, we were up again, mapping out our attack plan of Hamburg over breakfast. We set off walking in the rain, toughing it out in hopes that we would see some sunshine at some point throughout the day. We strolled through the Rathaus area, and naturally Caleb and Mario did a little shoe shopping, followed by my hunt for a green Longchamp LePliage tote, which was a success! We knew it was time to look for lunch when we found ourselves hypnotized by all of the high end headphones in the apple store. We ate at Café Melange’ which was settled on one of the canals through the Rathaus area and we enjoyed the slow service as a chance to regain our strength for the rest of the day. We stopped into the Reeperbahn, now affectionaley referred to as the “creeperbahn”. We got some pictures at the Beatles-platz and then made a B-line for the harbor, where we stumbled across a beer festival of some sort. Then we strolled through the Botanical gardens, taking our time to stop for some jumping pics and for a quick lesson from Caleb about bees. I learned that there are three kinds of bees. Slowly but surely we made it through the rest of the gardens, stopping lastly at the rose garden before heading back to the hostel to change for dinner. We enjoyed some German fare at Paulaners and then strolled around Hamburg some more and enjoyed the evening. On Sunday morning we found a café to sit and relax in before heading over to St. Michaelis church where we found ourselves trekking all the way up to the observation area in the clock tower of the church. It was a bit of a foggy day, but the view of Hamburg from the top was still stunning. It was the perfect way to end our weekend in Hamburg. Lastly, I have a knack for losing things and I’ve been surprisingly good at not doing that thus far on the program. Just when I think I’ve escaped the risk of losing something important, I can’t find the train reservation with our seat numbers and the number of the wagon that our seats were in. After frantically looking through all of my belongings, I had to admit that it had gotten away from me at some point and that it was nowhere to be found. This isn’t surprising when something like this happens to me, but I felt terrible that the rest of the group was feeling the stress of the situation as well. I tried my best to remember the numbers of the wagon and our seats, and by sheer grace I was somewhere in the right ballpark. I say all of this to say, keep track of your train tickets, passports, and eurail passes, people. No fatalities.