I went to Hamburg last weekend. Most of the pictures I took from Hamburg were in Miniatur Wunderland, which will be Monday’s post because it’s amazing and because I took a bazillion pictures that I haven’t sorted through yet. There were a few other reasons to go to Hamburg besides the wonderment that is Miniatur Wunderland, though
1) I wanted a chance to visit with Sarah Stäbler and her husband Tobias before their baby is born. I probably won’t get another chance to hang out with them before I leave Germany.
2) I wanted to find Beatles-Platz. It’s a tiny section of the Reeperbahn adjacent to where the Beatles played. I couldn’t find it last time I was in Hamburg, but I went this time armed with more information and more time to look for it. More importantly, I had looked at pictures of it this time, so I knew what the heck I was looking for.
3) Another Category One station, the Hamburg-Altona station. Then there were five…
I’d like to begin the show and tell portion of this post by commenting that I had forgotten just how strange the Hamburg main train station is. It’s set up a little bit like an Oreo cookie- the restaurants and shops are on the upper levels at either end, and the creamy center of train platforms is down a flight of stairs. The two ends are connected on the inside of the building only by way of the train platforms.
Beatles-Platz is right at the intersection of Große Freiheit and the Reeperbahn. The “statues” aren’t really anything of the sort, they’re actually just metal outlines of the Beatles. The three in front are John, Paul, and George, and the drummer is supposed to look a little like Ringo and a little like Pete Best.
Standing a little way off to the right is one more guitarist. The Internet says the fifth Beatle is supposed to represent Stuart Sutcliffe, the original Bass player for the band. You can’t see it clearly in these photos, but the Beatles-Platz is circular, and is paved black to look like a vinyl record. It’s fairly striking.
On Saturday morning, I had brunch with Sarah and Tobias. As is my custom, I completely misjudged my travel time and arrived ridiculously early. This gave me some time to look at the artwork on the buildings nearby.
This was a giant door leading into a tattoo and piercing shop.
An apartment building. The bird was striking. The graffiti over top of the artwork was really unfortunate.
I’m not sure what to make of this one. It reminds me of someone I know, though…
People in this town make art with biiiiig ladders.
This one was totally my favorite. The girl on the purple scooter is awesome. It also reminds me of someone I know.
Brunch with Sarah and Tobi was pretty great- good food, and good company. It’s not completely visible in this picture, but Sarah is wearing a How I Met Your Mother maternity shirt. It says “I’m going to be Legen…wait for it…”
After brunch, we walked around the neighborhood a tiny bit until we reached the U-Bahn station I needed to move on to the next part of the day. Next up, Miniatur Wunderland!
It took me two visits to find Beatles-Platz. Are there any sights that you haven’t been able to find on the first try?
I’m less than thirty weeks from the end of my stay here, less than 200 days from moving back to the United States. I’ve watched many of my fellow expatriate bloggers go through the process of leaving, and every time one of us approaches the end, there’s a sort of checklist that we go through. Been to Oktoberfest? Check. Taken the usual picture of Neuschwanstein? Check. Had a beer on the Zugspitze? Seen Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate? Visited Prague? Check, check, check.
I’m no different. There’s a slew of things that I feel compelled to finish before I go. I still have a few Category One stations left to visit. I have a bunch of cities and countries that I want to see before I leave. Moving back to the US won’t stop me from visiting and traveling around Europe, but it will slow it down a great deal.
Even so, the Countdown Checklist mode has set in for me too. I just got back from Hamburg, and between now and my departure in October, I’m going to take trips to Dresden, Leipzig, Heidelberg (#hbergmeetup!), Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Berlin again, and Furth im Wald to see a giant robot dragon!
I’m also doing some extreme padding of my “countries I’ve visited” resume before I go. Here’s the places I’ve got solid plans to visit:
Brussels, Belgium
Bruges, Belgium
Luxembourg City, Luxembourg
Keukenhof for the Tulip Festival, just outside of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Helsinki, Finland
Stockholm, Sweden
Oslo, Norway
Copenhagen, Denmark
Krakow, Poland and Auschwitz
Budapest, Hungary
Vienna, Austria (again)
Bratislava, Slovakia
Vaduz, Liechtenstein
…and that’s all before mid-summer!
For those of you who have moved back home, did you have a Repatriation Countdown Checklist? Tell me about it in comments.
By now, most of my readers have figured out that I travel a lot, that I’m planning on continuing to travel a lot, and that more often than not, I travel alone. I’m pretty experienced at traveling, and I’ve more or less got my rhythm down. What would surprise most of you, I think, is that I suffer from fairly strong travel anxiety. Utterly pointless, illogical, irrational, but still very powerful. In my head, it’s kind of like this:
Gut: We’re gonna miss the train! Brain: Relax. We have seven whole minutes to walk from platform four to platform eight. We could moonwalk there and still make it. Gut: But what if this train is EIGHT minutes late to the connecting station? Brain: Then we take another train. There’s another train going to the same place twenty-five minutes later. Gut: WE’RE GONNA MISS THE TRAIN! Brain: ::sigh::
…and so on.
When I’m traveling, I get into a partial flight or fight mode. My heart beats faster than normal even if I get to the train station or airport with hours to spare. If I have imbibed more than a tablespoon of water, you can bet I’ll be in the bathroom repeatedly. (I joke that I’m just following Imperial protocol, dumping all of my garbage before I make the jump to light speed.) I’m always worried that I’ve left something behind or forgotten to lock my apartment door. I can’t fall asleep on planes or trains either; I’m usually too wired.
My brain knows that I can handle anything that might come up- there’s always another way to get to where I’m going. I’ve never been truly lost, or truly stranded. Even when my flights got buggered up last March and I was stuck in Frankfurt for an extra night, I was able to find a hotel with Jenny’s assistance from her computer back in Regensburg. I’m not even all that bothered by airplane turbulence.
Every problem I’ve ever encountered while traveling has been solvable and none of it was really all that bad.
…Gut: But we’re gonna miss the plane!
Do you suffer from (or enjoy) any travel anxiety? How do you handle it?
In the weekend leading up to Rose Monday, I went to Karlsruhe. My reasons were selecting Karlsruhe were twofold:
First, Alex of ifs ands & butts and Bev of Confuzzledom both live there, and they’ve been posting nifty things about the city for as long as I’ve known each of them, so meeting them and seeing their city was definitely something I wanted to do.
Secondly, Karlsruhe, is a category one train station, and I’m trying to see every category one train station before I leave Germany for good in October. For those keeping score, this trip allowed me to see the Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Köln Messe/Deutz, Dortmund, and Duisburg stations. Only six to go!
I did get to have dinner with Bev and her boyfriend Jan in the local Irish pub. The food was delicious and the company was fabulous. Alex was working, so she wasn’t able to hang out very much, but we did get to chat a little bit. I very much enjoyed meeting Bev and Jan though; they’re both really neat.
All of the pictures I took in Karlsruhe were taken during my visit to the Badisches Landesmuseum, nestled in the Karlsruhe Palace. The walk up to the palace is a big open space with some sculptures. People were out enjoying the sunshine. These gentlemen were playing a game in which they threw hand-sized metal balls at other metal balls, then picked them up with a magnet on a cord in order to throw them again. I’m pretty sure it was Bocce, but I’m not certain since my only exposure to Bocce prior to this is that clip from Splash where the tour guide uses it as an exclamation.
There are also a great many sculptures surrounding the palace, like this statue which is supposed to represent Hercules slaying Cerberus, but it looks more like a dragon than a hellhound to me.
The Palace itself is beautiful, or at least it is in the photographs I’ve seen other people post. For me, though, it was construction time. Karlsruhe itself was under construction. In fact, there’s a sandstone pyramid in the city that I was not able to find at all, even though I apparently walked within about ten meters of it: Because of all the construction, it was completely wrapped and obscured. (Google Maps claimed to know where the pyramid was, but following the map only led me to the Pyramide Shisha Bar. In hind-sight, I should have taken a picture of their sign for posterity.)
The museum is currently holding an exhibit called “Imperium der Götter,” or “Empire of the Gods.” There were some really neat sculptures inside. This one is one of my favorites- there’s so much going on here!
The museum also holds lots of paintings of the royals from the region. This is Princess Marie from Baden.
Who doesn’t love a little statue of Sleeping Eros?
Stained glass can be very pretty. These panes were quite nice.
A very, very old bicycle. Note the pedals attached to the front wheel, just like a penny farthing. The earliest bike builders didn’t figure out right away that using a chain to drive the wheel is more efficient.
Here’s another statue I liked. This one is tiny and bronze, no more than a foot tall. I should have written down the name of it.
There was a section of the museum dedicated to the Holocaust. They even had a set of the famous striped pajamas behind glass.
In their “1980s” section of the museum, they had a Commodore 64 with the original monitor and an old 1541 floppy disk drive. Considering this computer was introduced when I was nine years old, there’s no reason at all for seeing this in a museum to make me feel old.
Another of the sculptures that I liked was this tiny metal cat. This sculpture was only a few inches tall, and it reminds me of the kinds of tiny sculptures that my grandmother used to have around the house. Hers weren’t museum pieces, though.
The museum has a nice little gift shop attached, and I very nearly purchased one of these little fellows. The originals were on display across the hall, but the gift shop versions were neat looking. (And reasonably priced, too.)
On Rose Monday, I was in Köln for the Rosenmontag (Rose Monday) Parade. This was part of a slightly larger trip which included Karlsruhe and Stuttgart- I’ll talk about those in another post, because Cologne during Carnival is more than enough for one post.
First, a brief administrative note- I took more than 600 pictures, and I whittled them down to around 180 or so that were worth sharing with anyone. From those, I picked 32 for this post. If you want to see the ~150 that aren’t in the post, they’re in this gallery over here.
Second, there are a few things to bear in mind while looking through these pictures:
1) The best thing about the Carnival season for a big kid like myself is the costumes. There were so many costumes- I noticed a high count of bees, giraffes, and pirates. The people who wore full body fur suit costumes had the right idea though. The temperature wasn’t bad, but it was windy. Unless you were standing directly in the sun, it was kind of cold.
2) If I ever go to one of these things again, I totally need a costume with a helmet. Flying bars of solid chocolate hurt when they hit you in the head. Even a packet of Haribo gummi bears can be unpleasant if you get beaned right in the forehead. The candy was being thrown for hours, and after a while I started to shrink back like a kicked puppy any time someone made a throwing motion. The kids standing on either side of me made out like bandits from all the noggin-bounce candy castoffs, though.
3) These pictures actually span two parades. When I arrived in Cologne on Sunday afternoon, there was a different parade going. This parade featured more children, and wasn’t quite as large as the official parade on Monday, but it led to almost a quarter of the more than 600 pictures I finished the weekend with.
On to the pictures! The first one is an off-duty Superman, looking like a 70s pimp with that furry coat. I think the guy next to him is wearing a Batman costume, but I can’t be sure. This costume is particulary daring with the chilly weather.
Next up, a few Gnomes. The Gnomes aren’t what I love most about this photo, though. It’s the walking shower behind them… the curtain, the faucet… I think the shower costume is both creative and hilarious.
One of the many giraffe costumes I saw. I can pretty much guarantee that this guy was not nearly as cold as I was.
This next couples costume won’t make much sense to my American friends without context, but I spotted it right away- there’s a series of very cute commercials here for Kinder Riegel milk chocolate. I’ve embedded an example below, so you can see what the costume is all about.
When it’s time for lunch, you can’t go wrong at a snack bar with thiscast of characters.
During the first parade, I was particularly amused by this entire family of bears, each equipped with his or her own Honig (honey) pot with which to catch candy thrown from parade floats.
Another chocolate-inspired group costume.
There were so many great costumes that I put nine more into an image collage. The full sized individual shots of each of these are in the gallery linked near the top of this post.
On Monday morning, the parade started at 10:30, but I found a place closer to the end of the parade route than the start, so the streets actually looked this empty at first. Also, you can see that the windows on the parade route are often boarded up. I’m not sure if this is because of drunken revelry or if it’s because of flying chocolate bars, but this is a pretty common sight along the parade route during Carnival.
The empty streets didn’t last too long though, and before long there was plenty to see.
There was a lot of NSA/Google/Facebook/Data-Security themed stuff.
I made these six pictures into a collage because they were all together, and there’s a theme here. The green wigged, blind-folded people have eyes on their hands to represent the constant watching of data leeches like Facebook. I think the NSA camera stick holders in the previous picture were also with this group. Plus the green wigs were conga-lining, which was kind of fun.
I don’t know what this one was supposed to represent, but I thought it was neat looking.
I have no earthly idea what the story is with this group.
The German on this golden knight translates to “Your cellphone, your freedom.” I’m not entirely sure what they meant by that, but I think it was another one talking about data security.
There were lots of marching band and drum corps types of groups in various ornate uniforms…
…and one group playing marching washboards.
Some of the floats were single-rider deals, like this one. The head was turning back and forth.
More marching bands…
More single-rider floats…
I think after about six hours of playing the same song, you start to go a little crazy. Like this guy.
Once again, I have no clue at all what the deal is with the giant yellow heads that all have soul patches and deerstalker caps. I bet they’re heavy though.
There were lots of horses in the parade, but these two had the longest manes of any horse I’ve ever seen. Usually, parade horses have their manes trimmed very short- not so with these two.
The Zugordners (parade marshals) were utterly fascinating to watch. They all had these bright red jackets with the little black hats that were vaguely English Bobby shaped. I have no idea what they actually did, though, because the parade sort of moved itself along without any special pointing from this guy or his brethren.
…and on to the floats. The German on this one reads, “Fun Ghetto.” Inside the jail is someone drinking, a pair of humping dogs, and other forms of caricatures of fun.
I’m not sure if this one had a meaning other than just being Carnival-themed.
This next one might need some parsing from my German friends. I think the German text is supposed to translate to “Upgrade you will.” The goat has a rocket strapped to his back. And Yoda’s wearing a scarf for what I’m pretty sure is a local sports team. I don’t really get the full meaning. Any locals care to fill us in?
This one says “The Death Star, Washington” on the side. There were a few floats that had anti-American sentiment. All the NSA spying stuff has really caused some friction between our nations.
See?
About an hour after the parade ended, I walked over to the courtyard between the train station and the Cathedral. There were still an incredible amount of people moving through the city back to the train station.
I was wondering how the city recovered from something like the Rose Monday parade so quickly, and now I know. As soon as the parade was done, the cleaning crews came out. A veritable army of people with brooms gathered the majority of the debris into small piles, and another group came by with giant vehicle-sized vacuums. That giant white tube is a huge vacuum, sucking up piles of garbage from the street. I’ve never seen anything like it before, but I think it’s pretty nifty.
Whimsy. Tacos. The DMV. 