Travels

Man, a two-week fall break is pretty sweet! It gave me lots of time to stay up until the wee hours of the morning and sleep in until noon if I wanted to. That's quite a change from having to get up at 5:45.  I was fortunate in a way to have my university class cancelled for the same two weeks, so I had absolutely no obligations to worry about during the break.

My original plan was to spend the entire two weeks just traveling around Germany, spending a day or two in a city before moving on. That means spending a lot of money and planning well in advance where I wanted to go, neither of which I was prepared to do. So instead, I chose two cities in an area of Germany I had never been to and spend 5 days checking them out.

First stop: Lübeck, about 5 hours north of Cologne in the state of Schleswig-Holstein.
On the way, I learned a major difference between an InterCity Express train and an InterCity train. The ICEs are faster and look and feel much newer. One also doesn't find that people get extremely rowdy, but I was seated in one of the four rows between two groups of people, each of which seemed to be some sort of gaming club. The group of women wore matching polo shirts with their name printed on the front, and a logo on the back that included what looked like pieces from the board game "Sorry." They all had matching lunchboxes and matching little plastic cup, which they used to drink an odd mixture of Sprite and beer. In addition, they had matching lanyards around their necks with miniature shot-sized mugs, which they used to drink some other sort of alcohol. One of the ladies brought a duffel bag that had all their drinks and snacks, and another lady brought a portable CD player that blasted Top 40 and dance tunes all the way to Hamburg.
I don't know much about the group of guys behind me, but they brought a mini-keg and plunked that bad boy down on one of the seat-back tables, and they had a great time as well. I sat in the middle with my headphones in trying to take a nap. Luckily my headphones do a great job of eliminating outside noise.

The main train station of Lübeck isn't quite in what would be called "downtown." It's more like a 20-minute walk, which I was perfectly happy to do after sitting for 5 hours. My hostel also sat on the outskirts of town, so I checked in there around 3pm, and spend about 10 minutes trying to figure out how to use my key card to get into the room. You tap the knob with your keycard, wait for the green light, and turn the knob to the left until the door unlatches. Apparently I interpreted the directions as "tap the knob, wait for the light, and turn the knob left or right a little bit until the door unlatches." Not a big difference, but first of all, turning to the right was definitely wrong. Secondly, you have to keep turning the knob to the left several times, not just a little bit like a normal doorknob. So yeah. After a while, I went back to the desk to ask for help. And yes, she immediately got me in with no problems. Awesome.

I had lots of time left in the day and I was hungry, so I headed for downtown. The downtown area is a big island in the middle of the Trave river, so there are bridges all around the city. There's tons of little trails all around the waterfront area, and tour boats going by every few minutes. I was hungry and tired so I didn't do much other than walk around to get an idea of what there was to see, and to find some food.

One of my roommates at the hostel was a guy from California, a recent graduate in music composition from UC Riverside. He was in Germany for a metal festival in Cologne, and then was planning to stay through Christmas, just traveling around using the CouchSurfing network. My other roommate was an older gentleman who said he was on vacation from Hamburg, but looked like he was living there. With two cardboard boxes full of random stuff, a small tv with the receiver clipped to the curtain, and laundry hanging from his bunkbed, he looked to be settled in for a month or more. We ended up having a slightly odd but somewhat fun conversation in which we spend about two hours trying to identify the songs he had recorded on his phone from the built-in radio receiver.

Over the course of that evening and the next day, I visited several churches, the natural history museum, and Lübeck's famous Holstentor, a remnant of the old city wall. It's on the eastern side of the island and sits in the middle of the main entrance to the island from that side. The inside of the gatehouse and towers has been converted into a museum describing the history of the town and the Hanseatic League, originally a trading organization and agreement between over 200 cities. I also saw the city hall and Cafe Niederegger, where marzipan has been made for centuries.

See how much fun I'm having?

Doorknobs. Want.

There's an old folk story about one of the churches here. The devil thought the builders were putting up a different building, and once he found out it was going to be a church, he tried to stop it from getting finished. But the builders promised to build him a wine cellar across the street if he'd let it get finished, so then it was okay. There's a statue to go with the story.

Part of the Rathouse

Hamburg was amazing. I had three nights there. I think Hamburg is more fun to walk around in - the harbor is really cool, with lots of boats going by, including little ferries that come in and out every few minutes. The city is doing a complete makeover of an old industrial district, so there's lots of construction along the water to build new convention centers and office buildings, etc. The new Hamburg Philharmonie building is about the most amazing building I've ever seen. The main concert hall is constructed separately within the full building to isolate it from all outside noises. There's the main concert hall and a chamber hall, and a bunch of other stuff inside the most incredible building that looks like waves and bubbles and water.

I also climbed over 500 steps to look out over the city from the tower of a church, visited an old three-masted sailing ship, learned how they used to make rope there, took a few jumping pictures, and figured out the subway system.

See the little tiny dots in the tower roof?
I was up there.

Partway there.

Rickmer Rickmers, named after Mr. Rickmers' son, Rickmer.
True story.

Why yes, I am 22.

View from the...well, you know. The back
of the boat. I can't say it without giggling.

The building just to the left of the ship is the new Philharmonie building. They used the original building's old brick walls, which can be seen below the glass part.

More posts to come (hopefully soon). Thanks for reading!