1. day - Hamburg

Mette and me arrived at Hamburg main station at 15:12 exactly as scheduled. Our hostel was easy to find wit the help of our GPS system. It is located in the very centre of Hamburg. The hostel is called "Deutsche Seemannsheim Hamburg", kind of a seamans mission. It says on our hostel bill "support of seafarer's dignity". Advance payment by the way. The womens toilet, on the floor of course, is locked with a key. The guy at the reception said that there is good reason for that...

St. Michaelis church, in Hamburg slang called "Michel" is just a stone through away. Many other famous sights are also just around the corner. We went to our room and left our stuff there so we could go straight for a sight seeing walk.

We started our tour at the harbour. On our way we passed a quarter with many Nordic churches. Besides a Danish and Swedish church we also saw a Finnish one: "Suomalainen merimieskirkko".

We took a long walk along the landing bridges, passing the dock houses. It was pretty crowded. We saw mainly tourists, but also some locals. As a German I can easily identify locals because they speak a typical local accent, which sounds a bit stiff if compared to other German accents.

Eventhough Hamburg is a fairly big city, moving around is easy as all major sights are clearly indicated with signs that show directions and distances. After the landing bridges we continued our tour through Nikolai quarter, where we could see many small pitoresque restaurants. Actually most of them are Spanish or Portugese. I wonder why? However, we decided to go for a kebab.

We also went to see the town house, which really impressed us. There is a nice fontaine in the inner court. The whole thing remainded me somehow about the royal palace in Stockholm. In a way I would say there are even more similarities between the look of Hamburg and that of Stockholm. I was surprised to see a Swabian wine & beer festival on the market place in front of the town hall. It did not really fit to the atmosphere of Hamburg, but I guess many locals do find that southern German "Gemuetlichkeit" exciting. At least there had been many visitors.

After our sight seeing tour we went straight back to the hostel.