Things went wrong in Hamburg

Last weekend my girlfriend and I spontaneously decided to visit Hamburg. We only did a quick research and then knew what we wanted to see: the Port of Hamburg, the old Elbe tunnel, the Warehouse District, the Fish auction hall, the old Town hall, the Jungfernstieg at the Binnenalster and the famous churches. Not to forget Reeperbahn! That’s the theorie…

I find cities look best when it’s lights are already turned on, so we wanted to see the most of the sights at night.

On the first evening we wanted to see the harbor. Our hotel was close to the Central Station so we decided to simply walk. Sadly Internet on my iPhone 3G was that slow in Hamburg, that I couldn’t see my map with the photo locations, so we had to walk on our own and find some sweet spots. At the beginning we walked totally wrong and ended up in the fruit district of the harbor. We then walked along the harbor trying to get to the right points. On our way we walked right in between HafenCity and Warehouse District so that we didn’t see both. We walked up to Landungsbrücken when it was already 12am, but I wanted to see at least the old Elbe Tunnel! So we walked trough and tried to find a nice spot at the other side of the harbor, but didn’t find anything. So we walked back, decided to take a drink and then took the train back to central station and our Hotel.

The next day our schedule was pretty tight, because we didn’t get the harbor shots… we started at 10am, went to central station to get a Hamburg CARD. With the Hamburg CARD you can use all public transportation (more on that later), and you get a discount on most tourism stuff.

Our first stop was the old Town Hall which is a nice walk along Hamburg’s shopping street. But I didn’t find the old Town Hall very special, at least not in bright daylight! We then headed over to the Binnenalster and Jungfernstieg, which also looked, well… let’s say nice during daytime.

The weekend was hot, very hot! After just 3 hours we already needed a break! So we wanted to take a train down to Landungsbrücken and make a harbor tour. But there were some heavy constructions going on, so we had to take several trains, which isn’t that easy if you don’t know the city… Finally at Landungsbrücken, we got a 2€ discount off thanks to our Hamburg CARD! Awesome…… The harbor tour was very nice and we got a good overview. But still not a single good shot!

And believe it or not due to the heat on the boat, the glue which sticks the rubber grip on my Nikon D90 melted!

Since we still had a lot of sights to see we hurried up a bit and walked to St. Michaelis church, spent a lot of time looking for a supermarket to buy some water, walked back trough Warehouse District (to really see it for the first time!) and then walked back to our Hotel to take a nap

We still wanted to see the harbor, the Warehouse District, the Fish auction hall and the Reeperbahn. We started again at 8pm to take some night shots. Mobile Internet still was horribly slow, so I still couldn’t load my map! We took the train to Landungsbrücken again, then walked up to the Fish auction hall, then headed further to Dockland. When we arrived at Dockland the light was just crappy so we waited some time and discovered one thing I find totally awesome about Hamburg: The Habor ferries! They have ferries all across the harbor, with stations that look exactly like Bus stops, just on the water. And it’s even included in the Hamburg CARD! We took one, drove to it’s last stop and then drove back. Totally awesome! Back at Dockland the light was better, although I now found it to be already too dark as the nice blue sky was almost gone. I took some shots until we wanted to go to Warehouse District. It was already 12pm and the Reeperbahn was much closer so we decided to visit that first. Which again wasn’t a very good idea. It was horribly crowded, but fun to watch. When we finally came to the Warehouse District the damn lights were already turned off and the entire scene just looked boring

We walked back to our Hotel and fell to bed at 3am…

The next morning we didn’t want to walk trough Hamburg again, so we decided to drive back and visited some friend we met last year on our Trip to Egypt… By the way: we walked about 35km that weekend!
If we had a better plan, I think our Hamburg experience would have been awesome! But even with our crappy plan the trip was great.

Rügen in Spring

In early April my girlfriend and I went (as my birthday present) to Rügen, a small Island in the Baltic Sea in the north-eastern part of Germany. Thank you! It was great, even if you didn’t expect it and we almost died . The weather wasn’t always great, but it was a lot of fun walking and shooting there together.

We arrived pretty late at about 5pm, but the ride was fun. My girlfriend had her first-time-ever on a car ferry. We checked-in and decided to visit a small town called Sellin which is famous for it’s pier later in the evening. It turned out that it wasn’t very easy to find this town. There were no signage and our navigation system didn’t know it either. But thanks to Google Maps we did find it tough.

On the second day we’ve been to the northernmost point in Germany called Kap Arkona and a very cute and old fishing village called ‘Vitt’.

The third day, which was also my birthday, the weather was much nicer and we decided to go walking. Our Hotel was very close to Jasmund National Park with it’s impressive chalk cliffs. Over a small stairway we wanted to go down to the ocean – not knowing what was going to happen. We walked and walked. Most people just turned around, but we didn’t really notice that at this time. We kept walking and walking. There should actually have been four stairways on our way, but they weren’t! It turned out that the hard winter here in Germany damaged big parts of the chalk cliffs and let avalanches of chalk and mud fall down into the ocean and the stairways with it. The nice thing about this is that the chalk colored the ocean almost turquoise and created a nice Caribbean feeling. On our way we climbed over many dried mudflows without any problem, but a few kilometers later there was one that must have been very new. I climbed at it, walked a few steps and then suddenly half of me was gone… caved into mud to my hip. I threw my camera over to my girlfriend which was still on secure ground and then somehow managed to pull myself out. Loaded with tens of kilos of mud I went into the ocean to get rid of at least some of it and then wanted to walk back the 10km to our car. But not my girlfriend. We saw a stairway at the other side of the bay, so she (much lighter that she is) somehow managed to find a way over the mud, whereas I just walked through the ocean… An hour later we were back up on the top of the cliffs. But we didn’t walk back to our car, no. We walked all the way to the Königsstuhl and then took a bus back to our car.

The last day we headed home and made a short stop in Stralsund.

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