That pretty much sums up my weekend. Kay bye!

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Just kidding. But honestly, I ate so much meat this weekend. I think my fat intake has been capped off for the month. (Until I eat that roast my host dad made for dinner. Oh well.)

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So I spent my Thursday through Saturday in Hamburg, Germany with my Sustainable Development class, the final sheBANG of Core Course Week with DIS. I’m going to go ahead and give an immediate disclaimer: I didn’t have that much fun. Like, two out of five on the fun-ness scale. Not sure why. A combination of things, obviously, but I think I just wasn’t really feeling it the whole time, and there was a lot of alcohol involved that I did not enjoy (and for the most part, did not consume). Regardless, I’ll just go over the stuff we did and the stuff I took pictures of, whether I liked it or not… Haha. Sorry.

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Day 1:

Woke up at 5am, packed a million different snacks for the five hour train ride, and hopped on a bus toward Copenhagen. When I got to Central Station, my professor told the class that all trains between Denmark and Germany had been canceled in order to stop the travels of refugees fleeing Syria. Immigration of refugees is one of the main topics of conversation amongst Danes right now, so this notification was shocking, but not entirely surprising. (Shocking in the way that I obviously was not expecting that, but not surprising because Danes are generally iffy on the acceptance of immigrants.)

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Spoiler: we took a bus! It was a nice charter bus and all, but the train would have been roomier and more steady. Oh well……. Presenting, pictures from the trip!

     

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When we arrived in Hamburg, we set off on a biking tour of the city. From this tour, I’ve decided the following: I need to purchase a Dutch bike (you know, the cute kind where you sit up straight with a pretty brown basket on the front), and I want to do a biking tour of Seattle, just for fun.

Hamburg’s version of the space needle. (It’s actually just their TV tower, and because of renovations and new safety laws, nobody can go up it anymore.)

The wealthy and expensive part of town

Town hall- a little more impressive than that of Auburn, Washington, if I may say so. I couldn’t even find a respectable picture with which to compare.

The great Hamburg city concert hall– It was supposed to open in 2010 and cost around a hundred million dollars to construct, but it has yet to reach completion. The new predictions are an opening date in 2017 and a final cost of around a billion dollars. All three of our tour guides emphasized the fact that the hall can never earn back its cost. Check out this sad banner we found on our last day in the city:

It’s an advertisement joking about this new building opening before the concert hall ever will (“philharmonie”)

St. Michael Church: my next great disappointment, as I never got a chance to climb to the top

One of those chain-yourself-to-someone-forever-and-throw-away-the-key bridges, still standing unlike the original in Paris!

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Right. That was a lot of pictures. Next, we went to dinner in “a traditional German restaurant.” This basically meant beer, pork, and accordion.

A gigantic barrel that you can reserve for your table if you want some privacy. Ha!

One of our tiny kegs that had to be opened with a hammer and was brewed in-house. After getting my originally 2/3 full glass down to around 1/2 full, I decided I needed to bite my tongue and chug the rest. I successfully choked on my first gulp and stuck with water for the rest of the night. I’m a winner.

Our meat platter at the beginning of the night: radishes, sauerkraut, small sausage, large sausage, stuff that resembled roast pig, some sort of chewy spam-like substance, and ham slices. Not gonna lie; I felt pretty bad for the vegetarians.

Our platter at the end of the night. We done good!!!

All the beer

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Day 2:

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We started off with a really long (as in seven hour) walking/ metro tour through Hamburg. It was tiring and unengaging for the most part.

Here’s a model map of Hamburg! I gotta say, whoever is making those tiny town models in Hamburg must be raking it in, because we saw three or four of them during our stay.

A still creek that I thought was a bike lane because THERE WAS SO MUCH ALGAE it looked identical to the bike paths in Seattle

Some windmills on top of Energy Hill. This place used to be a gigantic rubbish heap, but when they realized someone had disposed of toxic chemicals here, the city began a ten-year project to contain the mess by adding a lot of filter and containment systems to the surrounding water and by gluing down miles of plastic over the garbage to create “the world’s largest umbrella,” effectively keeping rain water from reaching the garbage. Crazy stuff. Now, the three windmills up there provide electricity for nearly 4000 homes. BOOM. Sustainability.

The headquarters for Hamburg’s urban development offices. The building was huge. I am not quite sure what all of those people are doing in there.

This is “Energy Bunker,” an old WWII bunker that has been repurposed into a cafe and energy production plant. It provides heat for about 3000 homes and electricity for 1000. But still, it was kind of weird being in there, especially considering it was constructed by prisoners of nearby concentration camps. (Another bunker across town now contains some offices and two rooftop clubs.)

I had a waffle and hot chocolate in the cafe. In the bunker. Again, weird.

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That night, we were set free at four. My personal desires were to shop around for some souvenirs and possibly a sweater, but that did not align well with the desires of anyone else, considering everybody just wanted to nap and drink… So I napped.

Then we went to dinner in Reeperbahn, the largest red light district in Europe. (Yay?) Needless to say, I wasn’t the most comfortable, even once we made it to the line of food trucks. I ate a scone and chilly cheese fries for dinner because I wasn’t feeling up to finishing any of the gigantic burgers offered by most of the other stands. Then bed.

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Day 3: more walking tours

Some pretty harbor views- I want that purple sailboat for my birthday, ‘kay Mama?

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Then we went to THE MOST AMAZING PLAYGROUND EVER. I was yelled at by two different adults for wandering in to play because apparently I am five. This did not help my mood. But still, revel in this amazingness and be jealous and go there:

Pictured: in-ground trampoline, see-saw, and hammock-circle-swing

Water pumps, water guns, and obstacle-course-like sandpits (what the heck?!)

The main climbing structure

That child is on a tiny elliptical. I mean, come on!!!

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Some scattered and non-captioned photos for your pleasure:

     

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To end our trip, we found out that Central Station was shut down due to Neo-Nazi and anti-Neo-Nazi demonstrations. I think they brought out every police officer in the greater Hamburg area. There were hundreds of them, often clad in armor and helmets. There were police tanks, dozens of police vans, and troops of about a dozen officers lining each side of every entrance to the station. It was positively terrifying, though I didn’t see anybody actually demonstrating anything….

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Needless to say, I am glad to be back in Denmark. The streets are cleaner, the bike lanes are more defined, the architecture is less erratic, and I feel a lot safer in general. However, I will say that the German grocery stores DOMINATE any I have seen in Denmark with regard to snack foods. I stocked up on granola bars, cereal, and chocolate.

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My overall views of Hamburg after this weekend: it seemed like an American city. WAY less homogeneous than Denmark, both in the areas of ethnicity and cultural variety in the shops and restaurants. And.. I don’t know. There was just a lot going on in terms of rebuilding and redesigning the city. So much so that I had a hard time deciding what was working and what wasn’t. I guess that’s what that gigantic urban planning building is for…

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Sorry for the long post! Congrats for making it to the end!

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Venlig hilsen/ best regards,

Lizzy-wa