HAMBURG and more

So yes, I know its been a little while since I've put a post up. But things have started to get pretty busy and I at least got to talk to some of you personally on the phone. This month will be even more difficult for me to post often. I'm only going to be in Berlin for about 1/2 the month of March. This Friday my group leaves for an excursion to Karkow, Poland. We will be there from Friday until next Tuesday. Then our Spring Break starts the 15th of March and ends on my birthday. Then my group leaves for another, but longer, excursion to Budapest, Hungary and Transylvania, Romania on March 25th. We won't return to Berlin from this excursion until April 3rd. So needless to say, I'll be MIA for most of March.

Moving on, I was able to travel to Hamburg this past Saturday with three of people in my program. This was just a fun little day trip that we planned. A group of 5 is able to travel anywhere in Germany on a train ticket known as the "Schöneswochenende Karte." This translates to "Happy Weekend Ticket." What it means is that its good on weekends, starting either on Friday night at midnight or Saturday night at midnight, and lasts until 3AM the next day. The ticket only costs 35 Euro. So since we had a group of 4 each of us only paid 8.75 euro for a round trip train ticket to Hamburg and back. This is a pretty sweet deal. Of course, we had to stay strictly to appropriate trains, and make sure that we had the right connections so as not to exceed the limitations of the ticket. So here was our day.

I went to bed fairly early Friday night and got up at 4am on Saturday morning. Our train left Hauptbahnhof at 5:23am. We made one connection in a town about 2 1/2 hours north of Berlin. The name slips my memory at the moment. We then rode our connecting train for about another hour and 1/2 and arrived in Hamburg at 9:30am. I got some sleep in on the train, but not much. The that day sucked too. It was cold, rainy, and windy. Only later did I find out why the weather was bad. I'll explain later. So in Hamburg we basically just picked out on a map that we got in the train station what sites we wanted to see and visit and then walked to then and checked everything out. We first walked to Rathaus Hamburg (the city hall) and stopped and took some pictures of a couple of churches and other things along the way. We went inside the Rathaus and looked around. The building was huge and really old and nice inside. You can see some of those pictures on my webshots. We then looked around the little square that the Rathaus was in. There was a WWI memorial and really nice shopping district located along the River Elbe. The river is one of the biggest in Germany and runs right through Hamburg. For this reason, Hamburg has a huge Maritime and fishing industry. After looking at the shopping district a little and the river, we walked towards on of the big churches. The church was one of Martin Luther's first churches and was called St. Michaels. From there we walked down to the water front to check out the Marina and also look at an old Schooner that had been turned into a museum. We checked out the Schooner and the exhibitions inside. They were really neat, and we were pretty much allowed to go anyway on the ship.

After that we sat down and ate lunch at a nice little bistro near the Marina. I had an AMAZING Fishsuppe (Fish soup). It was the first time I'd had seafood since arriving in Germany and it was amazing. We sat in the cafe for well over an over to eat, warm up, and plan out where to go next. We walked along the rest of the harbor to look for a fish market that was suppose to be there. The market happened to be closed that day, but we did see a neat tunnel that ran under the entire river from one bank to the other. Small cars and people could use the tunnel to cross the river. From there, we walked to Hamburg's famous "Reeperbahn" (red light district). WOW! The district was HUGE and just funny to see. It's totally mind boggling what the Europeans find appropriate and what American's would find revolting. German's strolled through the Red Light District like it was nothing and couldn't care less if every-other store has strip joint or porn shop. Really weird. From there we walked back down toward the shopping district and center of the city. We walked around some of the shopping district we didn't see before and looked for a place to sit and eat dinner. I found the best place ever! I found the Hofbräuhaus-Hamburg. This is a "sister" restaurant to the world famous brewery, restaurant, and beer garden in Munich - the Hofbräuhaus München. The restaurant was set up like and indoor biergarten (beer garden). The tables were like heavy sturdy picnic tables and were surrounded by other tables and trees. There was a huge skylight for the shine to shine in, although we had none that day, and a large projection screen for everyone to watch the Bavarian soccer team. This was probably my favorite part of the whole day. I ate the typical Bavarian dish of Weisswurst (white sausage) with sweet mustard and a pretzel. I washed down the dish with the world famous Hofbräuhaus-München Bier. This was a 1 litre beer! in the biggest beer mug I've ever seen. And it was absolutely delicious. Here is the site to visit and see some pictures.

From there we headed back to the train station to catch our 7:05 PM train back to Berlin. On the way back, we actually had 3 other connections, so the train riders weren't very long and made it difficult to fall asleep. We ended up getting back into Berlin a little after midnight and I got back to my apartment at 12:45. Overall, despite the weather, it was a really fun experience and worth the long day. I'm glad I got to do it and you all can look at my pictures on webshots to see everything I got to see.

Now, for the weather aspect....apparently on Saturday and Sunday there was a storm system known as Emma over Germany and other countries in Europe. I wasn't aware of this until I read the news Sunday and Monday, but trust me, I felt the effects. It was really wind, rainy, and cold. On Monday, I saw in the paper and online just how bad the storm had been. A total of 14 people in Europe died, 6 in Germany, and travel was difficult. This is a video of a Lufthansa flight attempting to land at the Hamburg airport.

On a better note of weather, I it snowed in Berlin for the first time since I've been here. It was weird weather today actually. It rained this morning, then the sun came out, then it snowed this afternoon haha. No snow accumulated but it was at least exciting to see some. I also got to see a presentation by a representative from BP about the Future of Energy and Oil in Europe. It was really interesting and I learned a quite bit of new things. I think thats about it for now. I'll try and let you know what I've done the rest of this week before I leave for Poland. If not, I'll be sure to post my adventures of Poland when I get back.

Bis Dann!