Part one: Hamburg

A few notes on my mindset prior to this trip:

First, I had some major water damage to my home last year, and it took forever for the problem to be diagnosed, and then for the exterior of my condo building to be fixed, and then, finally, for the interior work to begin. This entailed emptying four of my seven rooms, piling everything I own into the three remaining rooms, and ripping the ceilings out of the four now-empty rooms.... for starters.
And:
I have been teaching college lately, so I had two months off over the summer.
On the very first day of my summer, I went to Alaska for two weeks. The day after I got back, the workers came over to start tearing my house apart. This lasted for two weeks, and then I began painting and thinking about redecorating. This huge project was interrupted by my leaving for Germany. So, on the day I left, I was completely stressed. There were a zillion things to do -- both house things, and trip preparation things -- and there wasn’t time to get any of them done. I’d booked too much for this summer, I think.

Second, I spent way too much money in Alaska. Read my Alaska journal for details, but that trip's costs escalated way higher than I anticipated. When I was there, I saved some cash by eating fewer nice meals than I might otherwise have, but that was basically my only big compromise. In Germany, I’d be eating even more economically... which is a shame for a foodie like me.

Third, this will be the longest trip I have ever taken by myself. I have done solo cross country road trips, and I spent about half of my Japan trip by myself (before being joined there by my erstwhile travel buddy International Rebecca). The Germany trip will be seventeen days on my own. I do like spending time by myself, but we’ll see how long this solitary confinement in a foreign country remains novel.
However, I have three friends in Germany: one each in Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich, plus an internet pal in Munich that I planned to meet in person for the first time. So I wouldn’t be completely on my own. I also brought my laptop. This is actually the first time I have ever schlepped a computer on a trip with me. I wanted to journal as I went instead of trying to write this whole damned thing when I got back.

I used frequent flyer miles generated via use of my credit card (an account on which I maintain a zero balance, and have never paid a cent of interest, mind you!) to book a non-stop flight to Frankfurt. Booked the ticket from a free computer in a public library in Seward, Alaska, on July 1. I did have to pay $58.70 in taxes, but otherwise the flight was free.
Rockin’.
This definitely helps, given how much cash I was hemorrhaging in Alaska.

Speaking of cash, the exchange rate between dollars and Euros right now means that I am paying a bit less than 150% in dollars compared to Euros. So if something cost €10, it was really a bit under $15. I was rounding up to be safe and remain thrifty, so €30 was $45 in my mind (even though it was a touch less in reality), and €100 (to me) was $150, etc.

Germany:
So much to do, so much to see.
Scruffy Hamburg, endless art and history, trendy Berlin, great food, traditional Munich, a black forest full of castles, the home of Kraftwerk and Can ...and tall blonde frauleins in tightly corseted dirndls serving massive mugs of beer.
Let’s go!


Tuesday, August 10 – Wednesday August 11, 2010.

I was completely stressed out today. There were a thousand things to accomplish before I left Chicago. Wanted to at least tidy up the ruins of my house, as my neighbor Leone is going to be coming in to feed the turtles.
Nope.

Got all of the absolutely mandatory stuff done, except printing a letter regarding a parking ticket, and also printing my travel itinerary. Printer is dead. Already running late, I sped over to Kinko’s, but then I got the idea try printing this stuff at the library instead. The librarian was worthless, and the ancient Windows machines considered my thumb drive to be "unformatted". Same tech issue at Kinko’s. I’d have to skip the printing for now. I parked my car right in front of my pal Sarah’s house (she’d be keeping an eye on it), and walked over to the Lawrence Ave. bus. The bus made decent time. I got a pair of nasty hot dogs and horrid fries at that hyper-disgusting joint at the Jefferson Park blue line stop, and managed to get mustard all over myself eating on the train. Still, I made it to O’Hare at 6:10 pm for the 7:30 pm flight. I am going to have to mail that still-unprinted ticket letter from Germany, or pay a $120 fine! Finally relaxing after a few hours of stress, I went into the men’s room to clean up a little, and was promptly smacked in the face by some north African guy slinging a big sitar-like instrument over his shoulder. This gigantic musical instrument must have been five feet long, and was made of solid oak. It nailed me directly in the right cheekbone. Fat guy in a bright red shirt wasn't paying attention and rammed his oud (or whatever it was) into my face. I let him have it (verbally), and he kept apologizing, but the area just under my eye was already swelling up. I sat in the boarding area with some ice pressed against my face. This and all of the small cuts on my head (from shaving it too quickly this afternoon) made me really sexy for the start of my trip. Got a bulkhead seat on the plane (second best to an exit row; these things are really important when you’re six foot four), with no one next to me. Pretty-ish Asian girl across the aisle. Dozed a bit, worked on reading Death Kit by Susan Sontag (begun on my Alaska trip earlier this summer), and watched The Red Shoes on my computer. I was interested in this film because I had been told it was full of Dali-esque dream sequences. There were a few. I found the rest of the film to be rote and disposable. Thein-flight magazine featured an actress named Anna Kendrick on the cover. Never heard of her.  Another article in the mag was useful to my research, so I kept it.  More on this in a few hours. A trip to the bathroom and a peek in the mirror: a huge shiner stared back at me, the worst (and only) black eye I’ve had since I was a kid. Landed at about 11:00 am. Arriving in Frankfurt, I found the DB (intercity rail) counter. They would not offer the Summer Special rate seen on their web site, even after I made the guy look up the site and showed him the rate posted right there. Even after acknowledging the internet rate seen right before his eyes, the guy still made me pay €175 for three days worth of travel instead of €162 for five days worth (as seen on line). I only need the three days, but paying €13 (almost $20) more for the fare, and not having the extra two days of travel or flexibility in my dates (if I need it), kind of stinks. The admittedly efficient guy at the DB counter suggested that I save a bit of time by taking a ten-minute U-Bahn (city subway) train ride to the Frankfurt Hbf (Hbf = Hauptbahnhof, or central train station; every town has one). I could grab an 11:58 am DB train from there, rather than waiting for the 12:42 pm train from the airport. First meal in Germany: an “Italian” sandwich at Wrap and More within the Frankfurt Hbf for €3.80.

The five-hour ride to Hamburg was a smooth ride on a very quiet train that only made a few stops. The train was really crowded, and I almost didn’t even get a seat.
Germany is really green. Lush hills and farms whizzed by, and for a while we were in mountains. The tracks are straight and true. Instead of winding around the contours of the hills, the rail engineers have dug tunnels, plowing right through the centers of the mountains. The train passed through small rural towns, but also a few industrial areas. Stopped at Hanover: I think they make pretzels there. Once in Hamburg, a quick subway ride (also called U-bahn here, and in every other German city) from the Hamburg Hbf got me close to my hotel.

I pondered the German language. On the surface it seems intimidating with lots of big words like Grosseneumarkt. But really, it is closer to English than almost any other European language, including Spanish. I noted in 2009 that in many ways Dutch is also not too far removed from English, and indeed German and Dutch are very similar. The main difference is that German takes a bunch of words that are related to each other and crunches them down into one long word. So a whole concept, or a phrase, gets mashed into one word. “Large new market” would become “largenewmarket” (or in German: Grosseneumarkt. Grosse = large, neu = new, markt = market). Once one learns to dissect these things, the individual component words are often easy to decipher.

The German word for “man” is “mensch”.  It was funny to hear someone, in a moment of frustration, lament: “ohhhh, mensch!”. Things really are not so different wherever one travels.

My first impression of Hamburg is that it is pretty shady. After all, it is a port town. At the busy train station, a bum was passed out right in the middle of a crowded staircase, with hundreds of people flowing around him on their way to and from trains. Like a big rock in the middle of a river. All of the people completely ignored him. More shady types loitered elsewhere in the station, and a couple of dirty dudes were drinking beer on the steps right inside one of the main foot traffic areas of the station. Outside, there is a homeless squatter village under a bridge, with mattresses lined up in rows on both sides of the street. This area is called St. Pauli. It is close to the famous Reeperbahn - the red light district. A group of gutter punks live in the shadow of the St. Pauli U-Bahn station; they were there all day, every day, while I was in town. I began to recognize some of them by face and by tattoo over the next few days. We’ll see what the rest of this city has to offer. So far my impression is not good. You do not want to meet a St. Pauli girl. She will not look like the girl on the St. Pauli Girl beer bottle. She will look like an especially dirty hooker, actually.

Into a somewhat better part of town (marginally), Hotel Commodore on Budapesterstrasse (strasse = street, so Budapest Street) isn’t really a dump, per se. It is fine for what it is. No frills. This is what one gets for $88.12 per night in Hamburg. When I travel, I aim to do the best I can for under $100 per night. In this case, the room overlooks a row of huge and overflowing trash bins, and the street outside is moderately noisy, even though I am on the back side of the hotel. There is a big carnival going on across the street from the front of the hotel. Also, there is scaffolding all over both sides of the building, including directly outside my window. The planks that the laborers will be working on are literally three feet (or less) from the head of the bed. I can only wonder what time the work men will begin torturing me in the morning. The room is basically a small charmless rectangle containing a bed, a small television and a small desk. I decided that I was a U.S. soldier occupying Germany, and this was my barracks. As befits such a scenario, I needed a pin-up, so Miss Kendrick’s in-flight magazine cover did the trick. The room was hot and stuffy, but the afternoon sun (at about 5:00 pm) was shining directly in. I suspect it will be cooler in the morning, as the sun should be on the other side of the building. As is usually the case in northern Europe, there is no air conditioner here. I am hoping I can get away with cracking the window overnight, or even closing it completely. I opened it - and the door to the room - as wide as they’d go, trying to get a cross-breeze.

Now I must stay awake for five or six hours.
Tired, cranky.
Black eye,
shitty room,
shady town,
long day,
no sleep.

If I stop moving now, I will crash.
So I went out.
Not having had time to print my itinerary, I didn’t have addresses for any of the things I wanted to do, so I just wandered around. I went out and explored the Reeperbahn, which was a ten-minute walk from the hotel.
This is the famous entertainment and red light area. Near the famous Hamburg docks, it is where the sailors used to drink, fight, and find hookers.
There is still a lot of this sort of thing going on, but it is also a tourist trap now. There are a lot of shady characters hanging out there. At 5:00 pm, it is pretty lame. Later, I discovered that the same is true at any time. It is all sex shops, peep shows, and really unappealing restaurants and bars that seem to be making no effort at quality whatsoever. I might have found it exhilarating twenty years ago, but now, I was over it almost instantly.

I thought that Beatles Platz (Platz = Plaza) might be interesting. It can be found along the Reeperbahn at the corner of Grosse Freiheit (a street; the name literally means “large freedom”). Before the Beatles were famous, they played a lot of shows in Hamburg, many of them in seedy clubs like The Cavern Club, right near here. However, Beatles Platz is nothing but a small chunk of concrete housing some completely artless metal silhouettes of the five musicians (including Stu Sutcliffe, who left the band before their fame, and died soon after). My interest level decreased more or less to zero. Didn’t even take a picture. The Beatlemania stage show is nearby. As I walked by, a recording of Let It Be drifted out into the street, and I did just that. I also saw signs trying to lure me into something called Panoptikum, which is a “wachsfigurenkabinett”. Let’s take that one apart: wachs figuren kabinett... wax figure cabinet.... a wax museum!
I never understood the appeal of paying cash to look at mannequins of famous people.

At 5:30 pm, I got 1.5 liters of water at the PennyMarkt (local supermarket chain) for only €.19 cents, plus €.25 cents deposit. Later, at different store, I put the bottle in a recycling automat machine. The machine scanned it with a laser, and then in a single instantaneous burst of air, it simultaneously crushed the bottle and blew it off to (presumably) an unseen storage bin. An LCD screen showed my cumulative rebate (one item in this case) and then the machine spat out a receipt. I took the receipt to the cashier at the front of the store and got my €.25 cents back (I could have also used the receipt towards any new groceries). I ended up paying the same €.25 deposit for every beverage that I bought in Germany; I got the rebate on a lot of them, but some I just dumped into regular recycling bins. Almost every supermarkt has a recycling automat. My water was sparking, not “still”. D’oh. Have to be more careful about that. I soon learned that the German word for still is "still".
I like that some of the liqueurs that I buy at home are so much cheaper here: Fernet Branca is only €11.49, but what is more amazing is that they carry it in a typical grocery store.  It is definitely a specialty item in the States.

With the water partly revitalizing me, I walked some side streets south of the Reeperbahn, ostensibly looking for Harry’s Hamburger Bazaar, a famous shop sung about by Tom Waits, and notorious for their collection of oddities, with African tribal carvings being the most numerous. But really, I was just exploring.

Random observations...
“Hamburger” more or less means “resident of Hamburg” when referring to a person, or “existing within Hamburg” for a business.
Along Hamburger Hockstrasse (Hamburg High Street), an apartment building has musical notes painted all over the balconies on one side, and curtains painted on the other side. Also saw an ad for Koffein-Kraftwerk, which appears to be a brand of cola, and has nothing to do with the legendary technopop band (“Kraftwerk”, by the way, means “power station”).
There are a few cafes and small beer gardens here, but none look especially inviting. Speaking of music, a few concert posters: Cro-Mags are playing soon, as are OMD, and Roger Waters will be here in June, 2011. Nothing like getting a head start on the advertising. I also saw a billboard featuring an impossibly gorgeous girl eating Hägen-Dazs ice cream. A caption identified her as Cosma Shiva Hagen. Well, with a name like that, she could only be a relative of Nina Hagen, the German new-wave singer from the 1980s. Come to think of it, Nina had a song called Cosma Shiva. I definitely wanted Cosma Shiva Hagen to feed me ice cream.

There are lots of bikes in Munich, but nowhere near as many as in Kyoto or Amsterdam. More than Chicago for sure, though. Washington Bar (79 Bernhard Nochtstrasse) has a bunch of small tikis in the window, and a reproduction of the old Zombie Village (Sacramento, CA) menu, but they were closed. Most of the dusty tikis were knocked over and laying akimbo in the small window ledge. The Onkle Otto bar is near here (recommended by Maikel, my Hamburg friend). So is Harry’s, which was closed when I finally came across it.

This part of town is really shady. Lots of graffiti, lots of gutter punks, lots of buildings that seem to be squats. One pedestrian street had the rotting ruins of a rowboat in front of an apartment building, dangerous-looking makeshift playground gear in front of another, and lots of legitimate graffiti all over. And this graffiti was indeed legit; check it out:

Someone had taken a lot of time to paint super heroes climbing all over the building, and to add slogans like “resistance is not the work of specialists”.

 

I also saw a smiley face painted all over Hamburg, seemingly on every available surface. No nose, not even a circle for the head, just two dots and a curved line for a smile. So simple, and it could have been the work of anyone, or many people, but somehow I got the idea that the same person was responsible for it. Beats gang tags, I guess.

Or maybe it is a gang tag.
The happiness gang.

I decided to find less seedy pastures, so I left the St. Pauli/Reeperbahn area, and ended up walking all over the general area of Grosseneumarkt (grosse = large, neu = new, markt = market). This area is a lot nicer than St. Pauli, but not too far away. I mentioned winding streets earlier; there is not a single straight line in this entire city. Also, the streets are short. Even the biggest boulevards change names after a few hundred meters. The outdoor market, a cobblestoned square at the intersection of a few randomly winding streets, was long since closed for the day. Children chased pigeons under a huge Campari-branded patio umbrella as a few restaurants, the only businesses still open, prepared for the dinner crowds.

Very hungry, I explored some of the ten or so restaurants around the open square, but didn’t commit to any of them. I did enter one called Thämers, partly because it looked old in an interesting way, but mostly because I was desperate to use their bathroom (need to learn the word for that). I accidentally went into the ladies room. Was just finishing drying my hands when a woman walked in and said "dames" (dah-mahs), sounding sort of puzzled. Not for herself, but for me, like “am I in the wrong place, or can’t you fucking read the sign on the door” sort of puzzled. I must have reacted comically, because she cracked up.

Wandered elsewhere, found an interesting building called Handwerkskammer, or Chamber of Trade. Went inside and took a few pictures of interesting tiles set into the walls, each with motifs depicting different trades. I tried to figure out the trades: locksmith, bricklayer, stable tender. More trade logos appeared on stained glass: leather worker, ship builder.

Eventually circled back to Grosseneumarkt and settled on a restaurant called Paulaner. They describe themselves as a Bayrisches Wirst Haus (Bavarian sausage house) and are owned by Paulaner brewery, as so many places like this are. It was nice out, just a little chilly, and the sun was just starting to set, but I sat outside with most of the other customers. I was promptly served a half liter of my first German beer by a girl named Katia, resplendent in her uniform dirndl. We’ll talk more about dirndls later. Ordered the Hand’l Tag, which I believed to be the special of the day (tag = day). After another half-liter beer and what turned out to be the chicken special, I was in for €15.30 (“reichnung” is the word for the bill). The half-chicken was kind of dry, and the salad was generic, but the fries were not offensive (they take their fries pretty seriously in these parts of Europe, so close to Belgium), and both beers were good. The Paulaner weiss (white) was a bit more flavorful than most weiss beers, just a tad richer, and the Paulaner dunkel (dark) beer was just a little bitter with a hint of coffee (but it was by no means a stout or a porter) and had a tiny bit of a bite to it. More crisp than a Belgian-style dark beer, less sweet but a lot thinner in texture.

A quick note on beer: although I appreciate and enjoy good ones, I don’t drink it much. Maybe once a month, if even that. But you wouldn’t know that from my recent travels. By coincidence, I have ended up in what might be the three best places on Earth to drink beer, and all in a row (Belgium, Alaska, Germany). There is a lot of beer in my recent past, and in my near future. I definitely took full advantage of unique brew sampling opportunities in all three places. But, after this trip, with my unintentional “beer trilogy” complete, I didn’t touch another for almost six months!

A yellowjacket kept trying to join me in my meal.
Twice I had to get up and do a little shooing-the-bee dance.
I am aware of the current global problem of bees dying en masse, and I am aware of the agricultural, economic, and nutritional repercussions of potential bee extinction.
Nevertheless, this bee eventually died at my hand.
Don’t fuck with my meal, bee.

Near Grosseneumarkt is St. Michel, a big church with the tenth highest bell tower in Europe, and the only 360-degree panoramic view from a church tower anywhere (Is this right? That’s what they claim. Maybe they mean anywhere in Hamburg?). The tower is black with a gold clock face. It can be seen all around the area. That’s the point, I guess. Outside the church is a huge sculpture of an angel stabbing a half-man half-dragon with a cross. A woman with babies and a man with a child look on. This is a variant of the St. George and the Dragon myth. This motif is hugely popular in Germany. All over the country I saw it depicted in public works of all sort: murals, sculptures, building ornamentation, paintings in museums, tapestries.
At this church, there are also cool carvings in the wood of the church doors. It was getting too dark to photograph them, so I reminded myself to come back. I never actually did. For €9.50 you can go up to the top of the bell tower twice, once during the day and once at night.

Across the street is a restaurant that I had a look at, Rauch’s Old Commercial Room (since 1795). It was the sort of place that decorates the walls with 8x10 glossy photos of celebrities who have dined there. I always find that amusing. There’s a list of them all outside. Jackie Chan, Crocodile Dundee, and Daryl Hall. Hope he ate his oats. Sean Connery and the Beatles. Now we’re talking. Each table is in its own little alcove, and each alcove is named.

(The photo to the right was shot across town and has nothing to do with any of this.)

Thinking of stocking up on water for tonight and for the morning, I wandered back down the seedy Reeperbahn, where I got two more 1.5 liter waters at the PennyMarkt (this time "still"), and a Holsten beer, all for under €2. I think the beers and waters came to €.77 cents, and the deposits on the cans and bottles were another €.75. The beer was chosen because it was the only one not sold in a plastic bottle. It was truly vile, metallic and bitter in a bad way. It was €.29 cents! The day I find an aluminum can of beer to be an improvement over any other options is a sad day indeed. Every food store, large or small, in Germany sells single cans of cheap beer. There are always some available for €.29 or so, to be grabbed from big plastic cases stacked ten high near the entrance.

At night, the Reeperbahn is crowded full of people: tourists, shady St. Pauli denizens, and local kids. It is a divided boulevard, and they have events in the wide strip of concrete dividing the opposing lanes of traffic. A stage was being built with the Vans shoes logo on it. All of the peep shows are in full swing by this time of night, and the touts and hookers are everywhere. There is a lot going on here, but little of it is interesting.  Or maybe I am jaded?  Is it just that I've seen this all before elsewhere?  If so, why travel?  I have explored this...

On my way back to the Commodore Hotel, I found some streets north of Reeperbahn that seem a little bit less ridiculous. Active nightlife, but not so dirty (in all possible uses of the word).

My hotel room was less stuffy when I got back; it was less than 70 degrees outside now, and I’d left the window cracked.
Nearby clubs are blasting music.
Must sleep.
A lot.
The conundrum: darkness and quiet by closing the sound proofed (more or less) window, or comfy temperature by leaving it open?
Sealed it up and inserted the earplugs for good measure, closed up the curtains (making the room nicely dark), blocked out the world, popped three melatonin tablets, and passed out a bit after 11:00 pm.


Thursday, August 12, 2010

Slept reasonably well.
Up by 9:40 am.
The room got unbearably stuffy as the hours wore on, but the world was quiet enough by the middle of the night that I could fling the window open for a few hours. The girl at the front desk had told me that the construction outside was only painting, and that they didn’t start until 10:00 am or later. Good deal. She also printed that parking ticket letter that I had to mail, and my itinerary. Awesome. It is also nice to have wi-fi in the hotel room. I am thinking that bringing the laptop was a good idea. This place isn’t so bad after all.

Melatonin works wonders for jetlag, as does obeying the firm rule of staying awake on arrival day until your normal bedtime on a local clock, then getting a good night’s sleep, and waking up the next morning at one’s normal wakening time. This combo means that I felt pretty good on only my second day here. The black eye, however, is something I can do without. It’s pretty nasty looking. The English-speaking people here who referred to it (many did) all called it a “blue eye”. Most were curious about how I got it, and a lot of them refused to believe that I hadn’t been in a fight.

Slightly rainy outside, and forecast of temperatures no higher than 68.
Off to the art museum... eventually.

First, I must see some parts of Hamburg other than the seedy bits!

Wandered north and east through the streets of Hamburg, towards the old center of town, for a good three hours. I needed to mail that letter (what a colossal pain in the ass this has become), and I wanted to eat something cheap (but not, ever, American-style fast food), which means finding a grocery store and assembling something there. Wandered in the general direction of the art museum, or Kunsthalle (kunst = art, halle = gallery), but took my time to see the city along the way. I like all of the motifs of ships decorating buildings here. Shipping is the identity of this city. Down by the harbor, at the bottom of St. Pauli, the river is full of huge boats carrying goods around the world. My pal Sven, whom I will stay with in Berlin, comes from a shipping family here in Hamburg. For generations, they ran a line from Hamburg to Chicago (Hamburg and Chicago are actually “sister cities”).
Again and again there are ship motifs in Hamburg:

I saw a deco church, a statue of a medieval king, smiley face graffiti, and some dramatic sculptures of mythological gods and demons of the oceans.

   

I spotted a store of nautical antiques (Maritime Antiques, corner of Cajen and Rodingsmarkt). A great old church had been bombed during World War II, and was still standing, half-bombed and half intact. I also spent a few minutes checking out Hamburg’s Rathaus (the huge and amazing city hall building; every German town has a Rathaus), which was packed with fellow tourists taking pictures in the courtyard.
I prefer to have as few random strangers in my pics as possible, and with some patience, I grabbed a few snaps between surges:

This building must be seen from all sides. The incredible statuary and the thousands of details within the classic Gothic revival architecture can take quite a while to absorb.

Soon, I approached the Kunsthalle, but never once did I find a grocery store or a post office. I circled the general area near the museum one more time; it is a big commercial district that ought to have a market somewhere. I finally found a post office by about 12:30 pm, and paid €1.70 to mail that freaking letter all the way back to Chicago.
Bought a sandwich of ham, cheese, tomato and cucumber on whole grain bread at Schanzen Bäckerei (backeri = bakery; back = bread) for €3, and deciding that I needed more to eat, I got a sort of pretzel-bread baguette with chopped olive spread on it at the competing Dat Backhaus (The Bread House) for €1.80.
Ate that as I walked past the North Hbf (Hauptbahnhaus, or central train station). The Kunsthalle is virtually across the street from there.

I got there a little before 2:00 pm, and was concerned that I might not have time to see it all by 6:00 pm. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they are open until 9:00 pm on Thursdays.
Good deal.
Less of a good deal was the €10 admission fee.
Their web site clearly states that the price is €8.50.

The Kunsthalle was built in three phases.  The original building was later expanded, and this connected pair of edifices houses both the old masters and the new masters in two long wings.
Modern art is displayed in a smaller area perpendicular to the two larger wings.
This is all on the first floor (or what we’d call the second floor in the U.S.).
The ground floor has a small wing of art related to Hamburg, and a little bit of extra 19th century art mostly by three artists: Max Leiberman, Lovis Corinth, and just seven works from Max Klinger.
The third and newest building has four floors of contemporary art, but two of them were closed when I visited.
The basement of that building houses special exhibitions.

The pic to the right is of some great murals in a beautiful stairwell, but no one could tell me who the artists were.

One big round room is entirely devoted to the work of Philipp Otto Runge. I barely recall his paintings, but the room itself had the most incredible reverberation. A long smooth decay, and highly reflective surfaces. Any sound at all sets off a long rich reverb tail. I was alone in there, and spent a lot of time snapping my fingers, listening to the ten-second reverb time. It was really quiet in there, and I was totally able to enjoy experimenting with the sound. I want to record something in here. It must be a sonic nightmare on a crowded day, though.

The special exhibition during my visit was called “Segeln, was das Zeug halt!: Niederlandische Gemalde des Goldenen Zeitalters” (literal translation... “Sails Which Things Stop! Netherlandish Painting of the Golden Age”, but the first half is better translated as “Sailing Under Full Canvas!”, per the web site).   Sails featured many paintings and a few prints dealing with the sea. As we all know, the Dutch ruled the seas for a long time, and this is heavily reflected in their art.
I am a big fan of Dutch art to begin with, and this exhibit (which seemed topical for Hamburg, given their own relationship with ships), was very appropriate for the locale.

The museum also has a Francis Bacon on display, reinforcing my often stated insight that his work is coveted by all museums who don’t have one, but no one seems to know what to do with it once they do have one.
Both the Pompidou in Paris and Art Institute of Chicago have relegated their Bacons to hallways, because the work just doesn’t fit thematically with any other movement or school. 
Same in Hamburg.

I did like a work by Jenny Holzer, an artist born in my home state of Ohio. The work is a forty-seven meter long LED sign - one of those black boxes that can display text made out of little red lights. This one snakes down two stairwells, around corners, and through rooms, usually along the ceiling. Phrases in English and German zoom by the viewer, almost too fast to read: occasionally principles are more valuable than people; offer very little information about yourself; often you should act like you are sexless; old friends are better left in the past; opacity is an irresistible challenge; pain can be a very positive thing; people are boring unless they are extremists; people are nuts if they think they are important; people are responsible for what they do unless they’re insane; people who don’t work with their hands are parasites; people who go crazy are too sensitive; sacrificing yourself for a bad cause is not a moral act; private property created crime; religion causes as many problems than it solves. ...and more, and then a program of the same phrases repeated in German. I agree with at least half of these statements, but I’ll leave you to wonder which. My notes on this museum are extensive; if you're interested in reading more, click here. I had a case of museum fatigue by that point. In my bleary state, and having seen too much, I had dashed through a few sections that actually interested me. So, I went outside. Two half-Asian teenage girls were taking their own photo on the big plaza between the new and old buildings. I took their picture for them, after having their phone camera turned around backwards for a sec. Almost took my own picture.  I am just a clueless old guy, apparently.  There were hardly any people out there, but the few who were around were all young kids. One was practicing his dancing, one was practicing his bmx bike tricks, and a few were skateboarding, bounding off of the sloped side of the building.

After admiring a second and different billboard teasing me with the sultry Cosma Shiva Hagen eating Hägen-Dazs (art is where you find it, right?), I found myself crossing some railroad tracks. Thus I made a cliche come true: wandering up a street called An Der Alster (=in the Alster; it’s right along the edge of Alster, a big lake in the northern part of the city), I came into the St. Georg neighborhood. In stark contrast to seedy St. Pauli, here are the upscale bits of town. Literally, the other side of the tracks. Big homes, nice cars rolling by, and doormen with top hats in front of the Atlantic Hotel. I am most comfortable somewhere between these two extremes. No dragons in sight however. St. George, for whom this neighborhood has been named, has slain them all.

Wandering back towards the Kunsthalle, I finally found a Nahkauf markt (at Lange Reihe 18) and got a banana, some purple grapes, and a water (€2.39). Walked over to a random hotel (nice and middle-class-ish!) and parked my ass in the lobby. I was brain dead from art fatigue, and my legs were killing me from walking so much. It was about 5:15 pm by then. Sat there for about an hour, just chillin’.  In the bar, near where I was sitting, were cool menus with a motif of ancient flags printed on them, and a decoish mural behind the bar.

Walking back into the museum, I took full advantage of it until 8:10 pm, revisiting things that I had glossed over earlier. Also noted a plaque on the building, actually in English, stating that it had originally been built from 1863 to 1868 on Alster Heights, and expanded from 1914 to 1919.

Walked through a pedestrian tunnel after leaving the museum. It was marked “wallfahrt”. My translator says that this word means “pilgrimage”, but it also says that “wall” and “fahrt” separately mean “flow” and “go”.
So, yeah, I have to snicker over the word fahrt, which I saw everywhere in Germany.
Also: “schmuck”, which means “jewelry”.
Expensive stores all over the ritzy St. Georg area are full of shops selling diamonds and gold with big letters on the window: SCHMUCK.   My favorite though, is “Hamburger Sparkasse”. Hamburger Spark-ass sounds like a character in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Hamburger Sparkasse can hang out with Kilgore Trout and Montana Wildhack. Turns out that “kasse” is “cash” or also “checkout” (as in paying for food or goods at a store), and “spar” means to save, so a “sparkasse” is a bank (and again, “Hamburger” is either a resident of Hamburg or something that exists within the city). So, many of the ATMs here say Hamburger Sparkasse on them.

I was pretty tired and I was feeling a little scruffy, but I still decided to head for Le Lion (“Bar de Paris”), the first of the German destinations on the research list for my next book, Destination: Cocktails. Regular readers know that I’ve been working on this one for a few years. The research is close to complete, and the contract is signed: the book is coming in early 2012.  But I did have a few mandatory cocktails to swill in Deutschland.
Hey, I am on vacation! 
Located just around the corner from the Rathaus (at Rathausstrasse 3 in fact), Le Lion proved to be the best cocktail bar in Hamburg, easily. In fact, it was voted Best New Cocktail Bar in the world at New Orleans’ annual Tales of the Cocktail convention in 2008. Of course, it was also quite expensive at €12 per drink.

I had to ring a doorbell to get in. Warmly greeted by the staff, I planted myself at the bar.  I was the only person there for a while. This was good, because it meant I could talk easily with the people who work there before it got too busy for them, and also before it got too loud. I was supposed to talk to Jörg Meyer, the owner, and tell him that our mutual pal Wendy Miller sent me. He wasn’t around, but I did talk to the bartender Mario. He was really cool, we had quite a good conversation. His coworker Torben was cool too.  He is going into business making his own syrups under the name Forbidden Flavors. They’re making Falernum and Swedish Punsch already, and will soon launch a secret new flavor that Torben says is “tiki”. I guessed Allspice Dram or Orgeat which made Mario and Torben laugh. I think I guessed it, but they wouldn’t say. The Falernum is a little more citrusy and a little less sweet than most. Of course you can always add more sweet in a drink, but you can’t take it away.

I started with one of their two house specials, the Gin Basil Smash, made with special red basil. Very fragrant, I could smell it from across the bar. A solid, fresh-tasting drink.  Mario gave me a taste of Dreiling (which means “threesome” in German). This is a great liqueur made by Jörg Meyer’s cousin. The name comes from the three flavors used to make it: fennel, dill, and caroway. Caroway flavors are popular in Germany. There is a whole category of liqueurs collectively called kümmel that use the caroway flavor, making them taste like liquid rye bread (the most popular brand of kümmel in the U.S. is called Gilka - look for the penguin on the label!). Mario called Dreiling an aquavit (or aqua vitae), which is another category of liquors altogether. As kümmel-ish as it tastes, this product definitely says “aqua vitae” on the label. But this stuff, Dreiling, is extraordinary. Smoothest aquavit I’ve ever had, by far. Unavailable outside of Germany.
Boo!
Wish I could get some at home.

At some point a cute girl named Cirsten came in, sat down next to me, and ordered a Sazerac. She was a pal of Mario’s, and soon ended up being a pal of mine. (A few months later, Cirsten also met my Seattle friends Wendy and Dayne, and my Paris pal Forest. Small world!). Cirsten works for Weinlounge, a major Hamburg wine shop (Strassenbahnring 17). Cirsten, Mario, and Torben all insisted that I visit Weinquelle, said to be a superior booze store with a world-class selection. If they have Dreiling for sale, I am there. I learned lots of interesting things about German wine, such as that Cabernet Dorsa is the German variant on the Cabernet Sauvignon. Cirsten and I were having a nice chat and I might have convinced her to drive me to my next stop for the night, until I revealed that it was a place called Meyer Lansky. She wouldn’t go there. Mario and Torben agreed with her that I ought to skip it. But I had to see it for myself; even if Lansky is a dud, taking other people’s word for it is sloppy research.

So with great regret, I left this fun group of interesting people at about 11:00 pm, and walked - in a slight misty rain - over to Meyer Lansky. I was there for about three minutes, and I didn’t even order a drink. It was a bust. The cocktail menu looked really uninspired (yeah, there was a Sidecar and a Negroni, but whatever), and the crowd were kind of obnoxious. For the record, the drinks were all €8.50, they were blasting the bad end of the 1980s music spectrum, and it was kind of stinky and grubby and shitty in there.

Very close to there is the Fairmount Four Seasons hotel. Mario, Cirsten, and Torben had all agreed that this should be my destination. Apparently a former cloak room has been turned into a tiny little eight-seat bar, and the man working that bar, a certain Sicilian gentleman named Mr. Papillo, is said to be the best mixologist in Hamburg. Apparently he’s been sequestered in this little cave of booze since the 1980s. This would be the good end of the 1980s spectrum, I presume. I did find the Four Seasons Bar, but Papillo wasn’t working that night. It was hyper-smoky in the little room, so I didn’t stay there either.

Wandered back towards the hotel, along the Reeperbahn. It was as uninteresting as it had been yesterday. Smiley face graffiti, and lots of young people getting wasted. Thousands of them. The bars and clubs can’t hold them all, so they spill out into the street. The smaller avenues off of the main street are also packed to capacity with people having fun. Pandemonium. Fifteen years ago, I would have found this exciting. Now, I prefer the quiet ambience of a place like Le Lion. Stopping in a shop for some liquid, a couple of women about my age looked me over like I was a child molester or something. What’s their problem? Never seen an American who lost a fight with an Egyptian musical instrument in an airport bathroom before?

Found a shortcut through that quieter more mellow neighborhood that I’d wandered through last night, along Simon von Utrecht Strasse. Hundreds of people were milling around in front of an unmarked doorway. It doesn’t appear to be a bar or a club, it is just a wrought-iron door leading to a hallway lit in bright pink light. This crowd is a little older and a little less wasted looking than the denizens of the Reeperbahn. Not sure what they’re all waiting for. Some sort of rave or something? They’re all over the sidewalk, in the street, covering half a block. The cops don’t seem to care. Looks like a private club or secret party. Not so secret anymore. Directly across the street is a covered alleyway called Becker’s Passage, every inch of which is covered with graffiti. This is all near Paul Roosenstrasse and Bernstorffstrasse.

Up the street a little more, no one else is around except for seven or eight girls young stylish drinking in the parking lot of an industrial building. There is a shop here, closed for the night, selling hipster stuff: old vinyl, 1970s and 1980s stereos, cocktail shakers, t-shirts, movie posters, etc.

Enough of this wandering; time to get some sleep.
Made it to bed by 2:00 am.


Friday, August 13, 2010

Overslept until 12:30...
So much for being over the jet-lag!
Workers are scraping paint directly outside my widow but somehow - mercifully - I slept through it.

Took the U-bahn (subway) train to Rotherbaum, a nicer part of town across the Aussenalster (the bigger segment of lake Alster) from St. Georg. This seems to be a comfortable upper-middle class part of town, not as fancy as St. Georg, but a whole lot nicer than St. Pauli. Found an Edeka Niemerszein grocery store (at Hallerstrasse 78) and asked for four fresh slices of turkey from their deli department. They were kind of small, so I asked for two more. Then I asked for two slices of gouda, but they were huge! Way too much. With a baguette, 1.5 liters of water, and a banana I was in for €5.51. Made a big cheesy sandwich and ate it in front of my destination for this afternoon: the Volkerkunde, or Ethnographic Museum. The only other person in the vicinity was a girl who sat on the other end of my bench outside of the museum. Like myself, she was wearing black pants, a blue shirt, and black jacket, while eating a sandwich.
We matched.

Entered the museum just after 2:00 pm.
The cost was €7, but the museum’s web site clearly says €5. This is the second time in a row this has happened to me. Yesterday, the Kunsthalle also charged more than what was listed on their own official web site.
Maybe they charge extra for black eyes.
Or “blue eyes”.
Or people wearing black and blue, eating sandwiches on their property.

My friend Sven, whom I’ll be staying with in Berlin, grew up coming to this museum regularly. He has been talking about it for the entire decade that I have known him. Like myself, he is enamored with the juxtaposition here: an amazing collection of artifacts collected from all over the world, but presented in outdated decades-old displays that still rely on typewritten index cards to identify the objects. This doesn’t matter to me; most of the cards are in German anyway. There is a little bit of English sporadically and randomly scattered through the museum. I found this to be the case in most of the German cultural institutions. A bit of bi-lingualism, almost as an afterthought, when and if they had time, on a display-by-display basis. Of course, I never expect that the people in countries I visit should accommodate English-speakers, but I sure do appreciate it when it happens.

The Volkerkunde was almost completely empty when I visited. Quiet as a tomb. It was as if it had been forgotten in favor of newer museums with slicker displays and brighter, shinier things to lure in the kids. Perhaps: “We don’t do multimedia interactivity at the Volkerkunde”. There are a lot of fascinating objects here though, and all are arranged in a manner untainted by any need to be politically correct.
So refreshing.

I liked...

...creepy masks and carvings from Africa, and also folksy painted signs from doctor’s offices offering relief from a wide variety of painful ailments (from gonorrhea, to the effects of having a spell cast on you, to gushing menstrual blood, to being eaten by a lion):

...finely painted sarcophagi from Egypt. These were part of a special temporary exhibition called “A Secret Voyage”. The show was mostly photographs of Sandro Vannini’s explorations of Egypt, but there were some physical artifacts too:

...elaborate costumes from Indonesia, as well as a complete set of instruments from a gamelan (Indonesian orchestra), and a collection of wayang (shadow puppets):

...a cool old book:

...an awesome voodoo skull:

...some art from the Pacific Northwest, reminding me of my trip to Alaska just a month earlier:

...just a few Mayan artifacts, including this evil turtle-man strangling a pinhead:

...and the main event, the Polynesian collection.
This consists of a complete Maori meeting house and a huge collection of Papua New Guinea artifacts, plus a few items from Kiribati and other islands of the Pacific. I spent a lot of time in these rooms, photographing the collection in detail.

        

I finally gave up at about 5:45 pm, just fifteen minutes before closing.

My next activity for the day was to meet my friend Maikel. We were due to meet near here at 7:00 pm. I have known Maikel since the middle 1990s, when he did some illustrations for a science fiction magazine that I published. We first met in person in 1999, at a convention in Denver, and have crossed paths about three further times since then, usually when he has made it to the U.S. I’d been threatening to come visit him in Germany for a decade. Now it is finally time to make good, and to (as he put it) “leave some of your money in my country for a change!”. I had some time to kill first, and a few things on my to-see list were near by. Walked by Curio Haus, a building of some historical significance, but was unimpressed. Nothing to see. Near there is Grindeallee, the main street along the Hamburg University campus. On Grindeallee is Other Worlds, a shop selling sci-fi memorabilia (appropriate, given my background with Maikel). I also visited a comics shop across the street from there, and spied lots of other bookstores on the street. Germany does not have anywhere near the comics culture that nearby Belgium has, nor even the moderate interest level of France or the Netherlands. Aside from this afternoon, I don’t think that I encountered a single place to by the hardcover “albums” (the preferred European comics format) anywhere else during my trip to Germany. Even the shop I visited today mostly had French, Belgian, and American comics for sale. There are very few produced in this country. I didn’t buy anything. In fact, I bought no souvenirs on this trip at all. Just photos, something like 800 of them, and small mementos: my marked-up maps, a few menus, a couple of coasters, brochures from museums, etc. I have come to value experiences much more than objects, and I have had many great experiences on this trip already, with many more to come. Finally I came to Tower Bar. Located in a three story tall cylindrical building at the edge of a big park, Tower Bar’s interior is a big spiral ramp with cool Mayan motifs decorating the walls from the ground level all the way up to the top. I was supposed to meet Maikel up there, but the Mayan-inspired bar at the top was closed. By the time I walked back down and started to get settled in at the beer garden outside, Maikel had arrived. We went to Trader Vic’s. Having spent well over a decade writing about the subject of tiki, I have burned out on the topic a bit. I am not sure that I have anything more to say about tiki. But still, it would have felt wrong to visit Hamburg and not hit Trader Vic’s. The Hamburger Vic’s is fairly new by Trader Vic’s standards, having been opened about twenty years ago. We missed happy hour by mere minutes, but were able to grab the end of the happy hour appetizer buffet anyway, even if we did pay full post-happy hour price for drinks. I got a Tortuga, an old Vic’s favorite of mine, which was prepared properly, consistent with all other instances of this drink served to me in Trader Vic’s locations in Europe, Japan, or the U.S. of A. However, the restaurant itself wasn’t my favorite Vic’s; they really stopped building good ones after the middle 1970s or so. I think the Atlanta location (1976) is the last great one. We didn’t stay long.

We took a longish hike over to Sternschanze, the neighborhood just north of St Pauli, and north of Maikel’s home. This is just the part of town I have been looking for. Interesting mix of people, neither as scummy as St. Pauli, nor as ritzy as St. Georg, and filled with interesting shops and various ethnic restaurants. It was Friday night, a nice evening with beautiful weather, and lots of people were out having fun.  The main street, Schanzenstrasse, was packed, but in a less chaotic way than the Reeperbahn had been last night. Slightly older crowd. These seem to be more the sort of people I would relate to.

Maikel had picked up the (pricey) round of drinks at Trader Vic’s (€25), so I got the first two rounds at Dschungel (Jungle), a fun but scrappy little dive bar playing old-skool punk tunes. Maikel had gin and tonics, but I can get that at home. This is Germany, and although I don’t normally drink much beer - um, unless I am in Belgium or Alaska, or here - there are new things to try here that I can’t get elsewhere. I went for a Landsborger and later an Astra. The rounds were reasonably priced. We sat on a long bench with a sort of picnic table attached to it, in front of the pub’s front windows, along the sidewalk. We watched all of the people going by on the busy Friday night street. Other people sitting next to us on the benches climbed in the bar’s windows, right behind them, to get inside. That was easier than asking everyone on the long bench to slide out when one person needed to get up. Some of the people who were sharing our bench were smoking. It is always hard to get used to the smoke when coming to Europe. I have to admit that I enjoy the smoking bans in most American cities. It is interesting how quickly I’ve become used to it and how it is almost shocking to see people smoking when I travel.

Maikel and I talked about some of our mutual friends, and about international politics. Maikel and I agree on most political issues, but we approach them from different perspectives using different criteria, which is interesting. And of course, he and I got up to date on the subject of various sci-fi geek topics. There is a character named Perry Rhodan, who is sort of Germany’s answer to Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. His adventures have been told in weekly pulp novels, which began in 1961, have now reached over 2500 issues, and have sold over a billion copies. Maikel has taken over the license to create Perry Rhodan comics based on the novels. So, after forty years of reading comics and being an illustrator, he’s a comics publisher now too. Too bad he’s working in a country that has relatively little appreciation for this art form.
His first few issues are out. Here are five of Maikel’s comics (and on the bottom left, the latest issue of the weekly pulp novella):

Then we headed around the corner to a slightly nicer place called Fritzbauch (Fritz's Belly!) on Bartelstrasse. Gaststätte is the word for pub (but literally, it is “restaurant”).
I had an Einbecker dunkel, and was looked at sort of funny for ordering it; this beer is out of season.
These people take this sort of thing rather seriously.
One must order the right beer in the proper season.
We shared a table out front with two random women.
Maikel and the girls were talking about a big annual party that was taking place the next night.
Apparently it is sort of an illegal block party.
Every year this big bash takes place in a nearby alley, and it usually ends up with people fighting and the cops breaking it up.

Next, we took a longish walk down Budapesterstasse - the opposite end of the same long street that my hotel is on - to a few places that both ended up being closed, and then eventually over to Maikel’s immediate neighborhood. Our last round was at XVIII. These were on me, and a bit pricey at €12, considering that the place was kind of a dump and the service was indifferent.

Sternschanze is becoming gentrified. Maikel used that English word, gentrified, and so did the random woman we sat with at Fritzbauch.

Apparently the whole thing has to do with an old theater that was restored recently, and with much fanfare. Somehow this building is the lynchpin for a lot of tension in the area, but I didn’t really absorb the whole story. The place is closed at the moment, and is covered with graffiti (including the Hamburg-brand smiley face), ivy, and advertising fliers. That's it, in the photo to the right.

Sternschanze was once a working class area, and then it became dangerous and trashy, and then got arty and cool. Now it is getting expensive. It reminded me of Wicker Park in Chicago, ten or fifteen years ago. Soon it will be like Wicker Park is today, and that’s not such a great thing. Everything that makes it special gets homogenized and filtered out of existence. The punk bar, Dschungel, was once across the street from Maikel’s pad, but moved a few blocks away when the building was torn down to make way for new condos. Things are the same everywhere you go.  Class war.

Speaking of war, Maikel talked about the carpet bombing of Hamburg, and about how 50% of the casualties in World War II occurred during the last year of the war. About how the Allies kept dropping bombs even after all of the strategic targets had been eliminated. I pointed out that the Allies had to keep bombing Germany in order to pressure Hitler to pack up and move out of France, Poland, the Netherlands, and go home. Still, the east side of Hamburg had been completely flattened.
He told me about what are now some very expensive neighborhoods, and also some very bad neighborhoods, both off of my tourist map.

We went back to Maikel’s to hang for a bit longer before wrapping up the night. His apartment was rented via a sort of union connection where members buy into the union, and are then allowed to rent a union-owned apartment affordably and indefinitely. Maikel’s family has had this apartment for decades. He grew up here with his mother, moved out when he was an adult, then moved back in when his mother got remarried and moved out.

Maikel has a rare Carl Barks portfolio: ten prints or so, numbered, all the same number. He’s got every issue of the U.S. Spider-Man comics except for two, art prints by all of my favorite European illustrators, such as Moebius and Manara, and the original cool 1960s teak furniture that has probably been in this place his entire life. It’s a cool comics geek bachelor pad!  We sampled his Glenmorangie Scotch, and his rare Bushmills 16. Whenever I think of Bushmills, I remember Paul Barker from the band Ministry. When I worked for them as a tech, it seemed as though Barker would pound a half bottle of that stuff before playing every night. It had to be Bushmills, no other brand would do. Of course, the 16-year-old is not what Barker was pounding, the 16 is the good stuff.

Leaving Maikel’s, I walked back down the cool streets; thousands of people were still out having fun. I got a second wind and wandered a bit more. Schulterblatt street is lined with cafes, with their facades all obscured by dozens of people congregating on the patios in front. Like the Reeperbahn scene last night, these businesses were all packed to capacity, so people overflowed into the streets. I parked myself and sat for a while, just observing the nightlife.

A convenience store was packed full of people buying beer and other things. The store was blowing out all of their fresh sandwiches at half price due to the late hour. Got a baguette with brie, and also two waters, all for €2.68. The highlight of the walk home was the discovery of Ruckkopplung (“feedback”) at Budapesterstrasse 44, a store selling cool vintage music gear.

I saw a poster advertising a phenomenon that I had read about before coming here: Over 30 Parties. The same promoters also organize Over 40 Parties. These are just what the name implies: sort of dance parties or club nights, but tailored to the tastes of a slightly older crowd. There was one happening tomorrow. I was slightly skeptical about the whole thing, but thought that I might check it out. Wasn’t sure how clubby it would be. I stopped going to dance clubs fifteen years ago.
Not my thing.
We’ll see.


Saturday, August 14

Out of the room by 11:40 am.
As much as I like to explore cool restaurants and to sample interesting foods when I travel, there is something less inspiring about this sort of thing when traveling alone. A great meal is best when shared. Thus, my combo breakfast/lunch almost every single day on this trip was a baguette, fruit, and some sorts of meats or cheeses bought from the local markets. It was rather repetitive, but it was inexpensive and gave me fuel for the day. Quick too, and without patronizing fast food joints. And let’s face it: Germany may be the processed meats capital of the world. I did sample all sorts of sliced cold meats that I could not even identify by source animal. Not quite having deciphered the language to that degree, and without the aid of pictures in the delis, in most cases I just pointed at something that looked palatable.

So, today’s lunch was at the ol’ Reeperbahn PennyMarkt, my local shop.
A panini pre-stuffed with some relative of ham (possibly), plus some cheese, and a full liter of orange juice set me back just €1.83 (after my €.50 rebate from water bottles... the best part of that is watching the machine do its thing).

Off to see Harry’s Hamburger Bazaar (while it is open, this time), and then a few attractions down by Rathaus. There is also another museum and some smaller things to check off of the list over there.

Harry’s wanted €4 just to poke around in the store.
Lame.
A cover charge for a shop?
Didn’t pay it.
The first room was stuffed to the gills with weird African carvings (this is what Harry’s is primarily known for), but the room was actually kind of small and rather cramped; I wasn’t sure how much existed in subsequent areas. My friend Sven later told me that a tour of the place would have been worth every cent. Should I ever meet Tom Waits, I am sure he’ll reprimand me equally. Outside were folksy murals of African villages, labeled Kunst der Volker (“Folk Art”).

Wandered back up to the Rathaus area, also near Le Lion.
The whole area was very busy, very lively.
This is the center of the city, and it is Saturday. There are gajillions of tourists everywhere.
The canal that runs next to the Rathous from the Binnenalster (the smaller part of the Alster which connects to the larger Aussenalster) is lined with shops and restaurants, around a big town square.
It was a nice day, and everyone was out enjoying themselves. 
Masses of swans and ducks in the canal, waited to be fed by tourists.
A five-piece brass band played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.
A well dressed elderly man with bright white hair (and a van dyke beard to match) was presiding over a big bronze scale map of the city. He was hanging out by it, showing it to people, but he didn’t seem to be there in any official capacity.
I decided that he is the mayor.

I stopped into Ernst Brendler - right across the street from Rathaus - for about two minutes.
This is a shop that has been in business for decades selling safari and adventure wear.

Afrikahaus is around the corner.
This is an apartment building with interesting African statues and motifs.
The courtyard - containing life sized bronze elephants - was locked, but a man let me in to check it out.
Aside from the elephant statues, everything else of interest can be seen from out front.
Other ethnic --hausen are located in the area.
Chilehaus, Netherlandhaus, et cetera.

Wandering just a little further away from the town center, I had a place circled on my map along Speersort strasse. Someone had told me that I could find the foundations of the oldest part of the city here, visible under the street through Plexiglas covers.
I didn’t find this, but there is a lot of good architecture just south of Speersort and north of Brandt.

I liked a large square building, which occupied an entire block, decorated with a few dozen statues of people (various tradesmen) on all four sides.
Photograhped this, and lots of other intriguing architecture.

Back to the Rathaus area, things were even more festive at Rathous Platz.
Maikel had told me that there was a big and important bicycle race happening the next day.
In preparation, crews were building tents, scaffolding, and barricades around the Platz.
Another freaking parade!
Every single time I travel, I just happen to stumble across a parade.
I have no special interest in parades, whatsoever.
And yet: Spain, Japan, France, Holland.
Yes: this bike race is close enough to being a parade to count. Streets blocked off, and people crowding the barricades to see what is going on. There were also stages being erected for music, and vendors of food all around. Bicycles and bike parts for sale. Helmet companies, watches, cycling clothes. Various companies promoting their products with handouts or promo items. Just a huge event.
Ah but wait; there is a pre-game today. A sort of Special Olympics. A bunch of retarded people on their bikes cruising up the street.
Every one is a winner, of course.

Went into the Bucerius Kunst Forum, a small cultural center next door-ish to the Rathaus. They were featuring a small exhibition for €8: “The exhibition Rubens, van Dyck, Jordaens. Baroque Art from Antwerp focuses on the city as the largest and most influential center of Baroque art in Europe. Fifty paintings, drawings and prints represent a selection of works from the holdings of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp.”

Photos were not allowed, but I will not be denied this aid to both my memory and my writing: I snapped a few surreptitious pictures and snagged a brochure with just a few others in it. Watched a twenty-minute movie about van Dyck and nodded off a few times as it was playing. Just barely stayed awake! No actually, I didn’t stay awake. I was interested in the film, but let’s face it, in spite of sleeping in a bit each day (I am on vacation, after all!), I have been running myself ragged for the past five days. Walking miles and miles every day, and then let us say, indulging freely at night. Both of these things, plus jet-lag (which I have to confess was not much of an issue on this trip) will wear a fella out.

As always, read more about this art here. Out of there slightly after 4:00 pm. Wandered around the area for a bit longer. Things seemed too festive and vibrant to just walk away from, but I had no further business in this area and wanted to move on to an area that was perhaps a bit less touristy and might give me a bit more real local color. So I hopped a U-bahn U1 subway train towards the ass-end of Hamburg to visit Weinquelle. This is the (supposedly) amazing liquor store that the people at Le Lion had told me about. I wanted some Dreiling aquavit (or kümmel or whatever) to bring home. After a long U-bahn ride and a bit of a hike, I was surprised to find it closed. They close at 1:00 pm on Saturday, and have no Sunday hours! What. The. Fuck. What kind of booze vendor is closed so early on a Saturday? Catch them before 6:30 pm on weekdays. Hungry. Another market-assembled sandwich: €.44 for a water, €.89 for a 100kg packet of Schnikenspeck, some kind of salty beef, and €.30 for a paninni (day-old, I think). And yes, believe it: I spotted a third unique billboard emblazoned with yet another different but equally fetching shot of Cosma Shiva Hagen slurping down faux-Danish ice cream (the name Hägen-Dazs has no meaning in any Scandinavian language, and the product was invented in The Bronx), I swear, she was daring me to come find her somewhere in this great nation of Germany. (Trust me, this is going somewhere.) My train back was the U3, but at one point the line was closed for construction, so I had to take some extra trains and zig zag all over the freaking city. Then I did something unusual for me: I actually went back to the hotel room at some other time than bed time! Back in the room by 6:30 pm to relax and plan my night. Tonight I will go to Christensen’s Bar, the second Hamburg stop for Destination: Cocktails, and then possibly to the "U30" party, which has a €10 cover and probably features bad but expensive drinks. They claim to offer five floors of fun for the over-thirty set (theoretically!). It is in a big park called Planten und Blomen, which I have not yet visited. Not sure how much of the park I will see/want to see at night. Planten und Blomen is at the northern end of the city, not far from Rotherbaum (where the Ethnographic museum is located). I like the name Planten und Blomen. It sounds like “planting and blooming”, and I am therefore reminded of flowers and the cycle of life. The literal translation is actually “planned and flowers”; ultimately it’s a big park and that’s just swell in any case.

Made it to Christensen’s by 8:30 pm.  It is located very near to the fish market, which was once exactly what the name implies, but which now carries a wider range of goods, beginning at 5:00 am every Sunday morning. Christiansen’s is near enough the Reeperbahn to draw in business, but far enough away that they don’t need bouncers or have to deal with fights. I had a nice chat with Uwe Christiansen for a while, and then he took me over to his other business, Bar Cabana, a few blocks away.  This is a Cuban-inspired place, which is cool because of my recent-ish trip to Cuba.
He pointed out the bar across the street, and told me that Nina Hagen’s daughter owned it.

So, as we walked back around the corner to Christiensen’s...

Wait, what?
Nina Hagen’s daughter?
Cosma Shiva Hagen?
The ice cream chick?

Christiansen kept talking to me about his bar, but I wasn’t hearing him anymore. I was thinking of all of the billboards I’d been seeing all week.  I made it out of Christiansen's thrall a bit after 10:30 pm, and then I hightailed it back to Cosma Shiva Hagen’s place.
Walked in, looked around, and there she was!
The gosh-darned Hägen-Dazs honey herself, and the spawn of one of the most insane new wave singers to ever dye her hair blue. n Simply glimpsing the ice cream girl in person was enough. Seriously, what was I going to do, try and talk her into bed or something?   I found the whole thing rather funny. I chuckled to myself as I walked back into the night, having spent a solid two minutes in her bar.
Next, I thought, I must run into Angelina Jolie...

Without a really clear destination in mind, I wandered back towards my hotel to drop off a bottle of Christiansen's house-brand coffee liqueur and some water from a markt. I then headed to the U-bahn, thinking (without much enthusiasm) that I’d hit the Over-30 party. I was distracted on the way by the carnival across the street from the hotel, and so I stopped to check out the old 1950s-style midway. None of the rides had been updated for half a century. They looked pretty cool. With my trusty mini-tripod at hand, I wanted to do some long exposures of the rides whizzing around.

I sat at the edge of a picnic bench, with a bunch of young teenagers down at the other end. One young guy wanted to know about my black eye. Of course, like all the others, he didn’t believe the truth. A totally random guy on the Reeperbahn a few days ago had also asked about it. All of the previously mentioned bartenders/owners brought it up too. No one wants to believe the truth. More or less everyone suggested the same thing: that I just tell people that I was in a fight. I am not sure where this universal attitude was coming from. I don’t personally find it to be any sort of achievement to pound someone... and I suppose it’s even less of a triumph to have been the poundee. It’s kind of more glamourous to have been injured in a more musical way, right? Wouldn’t be my first time. Remind me to tell you all about the time I got tear gassed at the famous Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa while on stage with the band Ministry. True story.

On the way to the U-bahn, I saw a guy riding a bike.
The bike was pulling a trailer.
The trailer had a full bar on it.
Fourteen people were sitting at the bar, on three sides of it, having a swell time.

The trains were a mess. The U3 yellow line is still partly closed, the wait for next train was endless, and when the train arrived it was already packed full. This late at night! I am used to jammed train cars from early mornings on the Chicago “L”, so I pushed my way in. It was so full that a lot of people didn’t get on. Ridiculously, I thought of Jews packing into freight trains bound for Dachau or something. I know, I know, that was seventy years ago, but somehow the psychological scars of this fascinating and beautiful nation’s missteps insist on lingering on the world’s psyche.

After my transfer, the next train was also late, coming fifteen minutes later. Finally, I walked in a slight misty rain to the Planten und Blumen park entrance. The park is large, and wasn’t well-lit. I wasn’t super-motivated to find this Over-30 party. I basically headed over there for lack of anything better to do. I pictured a rave-type environment, and that just isn’t my scene. I did like dance clubs when I was about twenty, but let’s face it: I am virtually twice that age, and well past these things. I did find a crowded and festive upscale bar called Sands. It is located in an old brick building within the park. This is the only building that I saw among the flowers and trees, although I didn’t go too deep into the park or spend much time there.

Had a “what the fuck am I doing” moment, and got out of there.
Took another train towards Sternschanze, Maikel’s neighborhood, the part of Hamburg I most liked hanging out in.
On the train, the three girls on my left were in their later twenties and seemed cool, until one asked about my eye.
Grrr..... 
Three younger girls on my right were sharing a bottle of wine.
They offered some to the older girls, passing the bottle right past me, over my lap, but not offering me any.
Grrr.....

I only went one stop anyway. Right off of the stop was an absinthe bar that I had noticed when walking around this area with Maikel. I went in and talked to owner for a while. Might be a good inclusion for Destination: Cocktails. €6.50 for a Verte de Fougerolles absinthe.
By the way, for the uninitiated, absinthe is no longer illegal, it does not make one hallucinate, and it is no more dangerous to drink than rum, gin, or whiskey. There is more wormwood - the ingredient that was said to be dangerous - in many wines than there is in absinthe. The danger is all hype. This said, absinthe is definitely an acquired taste.  Most people compare it to licorice upon first tasting, but better absinthes are more complex than that.

Leaving there, I wandered down the street and found a big party, I think it was the one that Maikel and the random girls at Fritzbauch (bar) on Friday had told me about.
One of the girls had said: "go if you want to get beat up". 
Looking (as I did) like I had already been beaten up, I might have been immune. 
I wandered down a short alley and then into a courtyard between apartment buildings. 
A d.j. was playing the funny old disco hit “Born To Be Alive”.
He followed it up with “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Two Of Us” by Sparks (a classic band who don't get enough love in the U.S.). 
I liked the combo. 
Really obscure, but funny, music.
Both tunes made by white guys with big afros. 

The party was all out of beer, but a guy was pouring Jaeger shots.
Yuk.
I did not indulge.
I didn’t stay long.
Meandered further down the street, then up and down some of the same streets I’d walked the previous night.
Thousands of people. 
Smiley face graffiti.

As I worked my way back towards Budapesterstrasse, I walked by some antique shops (antik handel) and a record store giving away free orphaned vinyl (zu verschenken = to give away).

Got some food for € 2.50; a sort of boat--shaped baguette with spinach and feta in it.
They folded it in half, and put it in a press like a Cuban sandwich; It came out really flat and warm and good.
It was called pide.
Fuck yeah, pide is the shit, duder.

Then, later, for €2, I got a bun of pretzel-bread with a wiener in it, covered with something like bbq sauce, and a zigzag of something like sweet mayo, and a layer of something crumbled, like just the breading part from something deep fried, all broken up.

German street food.
Awesome.
I need to be eating better (read: more interestingly) on this trip.

In the room before 3:00 am.

This man has no head, he has a small willie, he is covered in birdshit, and he is trying to wrestle a giant fish.

Next time you have a bad day, be glad you aren't this guy.

1: Hamburg        2: Berlin        3: Munich        4: Black Forest        5: art digressions

Tydirium Multimedia Left Orbit Temple Destination:Cocktails Big Stone Head Send e-mail to James Last updated on September 10, 2011

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