On Thursday, we didn't venture out further than the Altona grocery store for some basics (beans, rice, bell peppers, zucchini, a chicken to roast, onions, salami, cheese, a baguette). We cooked spaghetti with the veggies and tomato sauce, which was little more than seasoned tomato paste and water. We did laundry, checked e-mail, paid bills and enjoyed the basics of a home on a rainy day.
By Friday afternoon, I had heard back from Hanna Heidemann and we made plans for dinner at her parents house with her parents, Doris and Hugo, and older sister, Katrin. After dinner, we would meet some additional friends for drinks and a taste of Hamburg's night life.
Hamburg's public transportation szstem is great. It is clearly marked. Trains have comfortable seating and you can get anywhere with one switch of train and a half hour at most. They also rarely check tickets, so Annette and I have been riding for free all across Hamburg. So, after a brief accidental stop at the Hamburg Airport (we seem to need to get lost at least once in any new place), the girls met us at the train station. We were the only ones getting off at that stop and Hanna had stayed with Annette and I in New Orleans in 2010. Within a few minutes drive, we made it to the Heidemann's beautiful and quiet home near the end of the S-Bahn train. Their garden was bursting with flowers, thick from the rains.
Doris greeted us on the front porch with the abounding spirit of a mother. She is a primary school teacher in her late 50s with beautiful shortish blond hair and a stylish eyeglasses. Once inside the door, we are greeted by Hugo, the man of the house (and only man in the house). He is a wiry physician, the humble head of internal medicine at one of the Hamburg hospitals and a professor of medicine as well. It turns out he is also quite a chef, world traveler, canoe-builder, a hobbied historian, and a wine connisoeur. He has a grandfather clock in his living rooms that is older than my hometown.
The menu was the back of the lamb, fennel with slice of hard, but sweeter, parmesan-like cheese, potatoes, broccoli and carrots, all roasted. All that after a first course of champagne, sourdough bread and butter, and a wonderful mixed green salad with a creamy dill dressing.
Shortly after we sat down, the evening Hamburg sun emerged to light up and warm up the dining room through its two walls of glass doors and windows. Regardless of the rain or general grayness, the sun seems ot burst through for a late goodbye to Hamburg each evening. It often comes out after its bedtime, which seems to be as late as 10 pm in the northern European summer.
This was our first sit-down meal at the home of locals in Europe. And the hospitality would give Mississippi a run for its mightiness. Dinner was complete with some Portuguese dessert pastries and more than a sampling of after dinner drinks, including German, Spanish and Italian wines, a Napoleaonic cognac, a Senegalese home brewed schnapps, thick and sweet with lots of floating things in the bottle, and a bootleg something or other that is rumored to cause blindness, or at least put hair on your chest.
By five minutes to nine, we found ourselves piling into the Fiat for Mama Doris to drive us to the train station. Not before making 11 am plans for paddling the city's manz canals in Hugo's canoe the next morning.
We spent the rest of the evening blindly attempting to "keep up with the coach"--Katrin's (field) hockey coach since her teenage years. Needless to say, no one can succeed in this Olympic of feats. We tasted many German beers, some shots, some outdoor clubs, some indoors with dancing. We found ourselves stumbling home happily under a full moon round about 3 a.m.
A hangover greeted us in the morning as we worked our way back to the Boczweg stop on the U-Bahn train the next morning to meet Hanna and Hugo for our promised canoe trip. In a bit of brashness, the night before, I bragged about how I like to paddle. So, after drinking 5 or 6 glasses of water before leaving the house, I was the canoe's silent motor. We were all pretty silent, actually. Hugo guided us through the myriad canals of Hamburg. We an incredible way to see the city! We stopped for coffee and ice cream on the edge of Außenalster, the larger of Hamburg's two lakes.
There we met up with Benedikt for coffee and ice cream, another German traveler we had hosted in New Orleans. He came a month after I proposed to Annette. After a couple of nights of drinking with him, I ended up with a "Game Over" shirt with an Atari-like image of a couple at the altar. We talked a bit of sailing and the triathlon he was competing in the next morning. We made plans to meet up that evening at the "Dialogue in Darkness" museum before we paddled on our way.
We paddled across the lake in the middle of the city and back through the canals under the bridges. Supposedly Hamburg has more bridges than Amsterdam or Venice, but Hamburgers are skeptical about whether this is rumor of fact. Regardless, that is a lot of bridges to count.
We made it back to Altona for a late lunch with not quite enough time for a much-needed nap before heading back out to meet Benedikt and Doris at the museum. Doris and Benedikt had already made reservations and there was some question about whether the tour would be full or not. We arrived before them only to find that we couldn't get a spot on a tour until Tuesday morning. But, at five minutes to five, when we met Doris, she said she had called in advance and got us a spot on an 8 pm tour that evening. And that we could wander a bit and they would join us for the 8 pm tour and translate a bit for us (as it was in German). So we wandered around HafenCity and Speicherstadt.
Speicherstadt is the world's largest warehouse district, according to Lonely Planet. Each warehouse has water on one side and a road on the other. Goods mostly come in via water and out via road. Cranes built into the roof help lift goods up as many as six stories from water craft delivering rugs, coffee, etc. The long brick buildings are each around a century old.
Then there is HafenCity--a behemoth redevelopment of the waterfront costing in the billions of dollars and two decades of time. When all is said and done, it is supposed to house 6,000 people and employ an additional 20,000. The area is an architect, planners, and perhaps a certain kind of tourist's dream. Otherwise it seems the opposite of Hamburg's charm with its huge modern glass buildings.
The Dialogue in Darkness is a 90-minute simulation of blindness. It is a tour led bz a woman named Cindy (at least our's was), who is 90% blind. And it is dark. For the whole tour, I cannot see my hand one inch in front of my face, despite my best efforts. There are about 10 people in our group and the tour is led in German. Annette and I are the only non-Germans. Benedikt and Doris translate some of what is said for us--primarily instructions about the next room, where the door is, follow the wall, follow Cindy's voice, etc. We are each issued canes at the beginning to feel our way and then we enter utter darkness. And what was there at the beginning of the tour for me was fear. At first, my eyes strain to see. But they can't. I realized I usually still rely on my eyes even in darkness. Usually the darkness is not complete. My eyes adjust and I can see and feel my way through. Here there was no seeing at all.
We started by walking through a simulated forest, grass beneath our feet, birds chirping. We worked our way across a wooden bridge over a stream and then over a larger hanging bridge. We crossed a street in traffic. We rode a boat. We walked through some sort of spice factory. We went to a bar and bought a Fanta and had a seat in the dark. We listened to music. There was dialogue throughout about the experience, little of which I understood.
As we continued, I found myself settling into the experience without sight. I felt safe, realizing they designed the whole museum for people who usually see to walk through without seeing. So, trip hazards, shin-breakers, and places to bump my head would be minimal. With that in mind, I began to explore and feel what I could find, smell, hear, taste. The learning curve for somebody losing their sight must be incredible. The amount of available information out there, and able to be stored in one's memory to use when there is no sight is tremendous. Mostly we ignore it or don't notice it.
After the museum, we said goodbye and thank you to our hosts, wished Benedikt luck on his triathlon and headed for Altona to sleep off the night before in time for the weekly 5 a.m. Sunday morning Fischmarkt (Fish Market).
The next morning we made it there before 7 a.m. in a light drizzle, in time to see a healthy mixture of drunk people still out from the night before and families just waking up. The Fischmarkt has everything from purses and pigeons to smoked salmon and fishburgers for sale. It serves beer or coffee (the latter with our without alcohol in it). Food can be eggs and home fries (3 fried eggs on a heaping plate of home fries) or fish for breakfast. The main building in the mostly outdoor market is a four-story brick hall, about 150 meters in length. It has stages at both ends with bands alternating from 5 until 9:30 a.m. The band we caught played British rock and punk. They were middle-aged rockers with ample energy and a smoke machine on stage. They played tracks like, "Summer of '69," "We Are the Champions," and "Rebel Yell." "With a rebel yell, she cried more, more, more!" we shouted alongside 100 or so others. So, we danced the sleep away, ate fish sandwiches and pondered if it was too early for a beer. A security guard chided me for drinking from my water bottle, making it seem illegal in the Fischmarkt.
We warmed up on the dance floor and moved outside to walk what turned out to be easily 2 km, as the fish market continued from Altona to St. Pauli along the Elbe. Most of the booths were the backs of trucks with sides that fold down. Crowds gather around a plant "auction" for lack of a better word. Another around a fish truck. They gather not so much to purchase goods as to enjoy entertainment. The truck becomes the stage and the vendor is quite the improv comedian. Even without speaking German, it is heavily entertaining.
We left the fish market with full and warm bellies and spirits, despite the drizzle. We crossed over the bike leg of the triathlon to get to the S-Bahn stop back to Altona, for a liesurely Sunday morning of napping, watching movies and roasting a chicken.
The Dialogue in Darkness is a 90-minute simulation of blindness. It is a tour led bz a woman named Cindy (at least our's was), who is 90% blind. And it is dark. For the whole tour, I cannot see my hand one inch in front of my face, despite my best efforts. There are about 10 people in our group and the tour is led in German. Annette and I are the only non-Germans. Benedikt and Doris translate some of what is said for us--primarily instructions about the next room, where the door is, follow the wall, follow Cindy's voice, etc. We are each issued canes at the beginning to feel our way and then we enter utter darkness. And what was there at the beginning of the tour for me was fear. At first, my eyes strain to see. But they can't. I realized I usually still rely on my eyes even in darkness. Usually the darkness is not complete. My eyes adjust and I can see and feel my way through. Here there was no seeing at all.
We started by walking through a simulated forest, grass beneath our feet, birds chirping. We worked our way across a wooden bridge over a stream and then over a larger hanging bridge. We crossed a street in traffic. We rode a boat. We walked through some sort of spice factory. We went to a bar and bought a Fanta and had a seat in the dark. We listened to music. There was dialogue throughout about the experience, little of which I understood.
As we continued, I found myself settling into the experience without sight. I felt safe, realizing they designed the whole museum for people who usually see to walk through without seeing. So, trip hazards, shin-breakers, and places to bump my head would be minimal. With that in mind, I began to explore and feel what I could find, smell, hear, taste. The learning curve for somebody losing their sight must be incredible. The amount of available information out there, and able to be stored in one's memory to use when there is no sight is tremendous. Mostly we ignore it or don't notice it.
After the museum, we said goodbye and thank you to our hosts, wished Benedikt luck on his triathlon and headed for Altona to sleep off the night before in time for the weekly 5 a.m. Sunday morning Fischmarkt (Fish Market).
The next morning we made it there before 7 a.m. in a light drizzle, in time to see a healthy mixture of drunk people still out from the night before and families just waking up. The Fischmarkt has everything from purses and pigeons to smoked salmon and fishburgers for sale. It serves beer or coffee (the latter with our without alcohol in it). Food can be eggs and home fries (3 fried eggs on a heaping plate of home fries) or fish for breakfast. The main building in the mostly outdoor market is a four-story brick hall, about 150 meters in length. It has stages at both ends with bands alternating from 5 until 9:30 a.m. The band we caught played British rock and punk. They were middle-aged rockers with ample energy and a smoke machine on stage. They played tracks like, "Summer of '69," "We Are the Champions," and "Rebel Yell." "With a rebel yell, she cried more, more, more!" we shouted alongside 100 or so others. So, we danced the sleep away, ate fish sandwiches and pondered if it was too early for a beer. A security guard chided me for drinking from my water bottle, making it seem illegal in the Fischmarkt.
We warmed up on the dance floor and moved outside to walk what turned out to be easily 2 km, as the fish market continued from Altona to St. Pauli along the Elbe. Most of the booths were the backs of trucks with sides that fold down. Crowds gather around a plant "auction" for lack of a better word. Another around a fish truck. They gather not so much to purchase goods as to enjoy entertainment. The truck becomes the stage and the vendor is quite the improv comedian. Even without speaking German, it is heavily entertaining.
We left the fish market with full and warm bellies and spirits, despite the drizzle. We crossed over the bike leg of the triathlon to get to the S-Bahn stop back to Altona, for a liesurely Sunday morning of napping, watching movies and roasting a chicken.
No comments:
Post a Comment