Kathleen Ennen

   Hamburg – 9-12 July, 2022   

9 July

Today was along travel day by train. It took about 6 hours so there isn’t anything to report today!!

10 July

Another cloudy day on our trip… seems to be chilly and cloudy wherever we are in spite of hearing about heat waves in other parts of Europe. We had a slow start and decided to find the hop on hop off bus to see the city. It wasn’t so easy – first driver said “no English” and pointed to the bus in front of him. That driver showed up after 5-10 minutes and said there was no English audio available but that if we wanted to go anyway we needed to get on the other bus. His English was very good and he told the other driver we wanted tickets so we got on and saw the city with no clue as to what we were looking at. One observation was that it appeared the entire city was under construction. Streets closed or partly closed and huge construction sites everywhere. For a Sunday there was a lot of traffic as well. We did get a chance to see the lake in the heart of the city and drove through the neighborhood of very expensive houses near the lake. Small sailboats dotted the lake as well as some kayaks.

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11 July

We walked the 30 minutes to the waterfront area in search of the small boats the tour the UNESCO warehouse district. We weren’t very interested in the harbor and container port but it couldn’t be avoided. We took the hour tour that was about half in the warehouse district and half in the container port areas. We again saw lots of construction and had a downloaded app to explain some of what we saw. The tide influences when the boats can get in to the canals of the warehouse district and some of the city is very close to being flooded during the big high tides. Some of the old buildings are on wooden piles so during the low tides there is concern for them drying out, or as water levels increase, of getting too saturated. I couldn’t really tell what the story was as my app kept jumping to other locations and details.

After the tour we wandered back along the street where we had seen a bunch of Portuguese restaurants and picked one for a main meal. Shrimp and salad to start and a shared paella with seafood. Half a lobster showed up but it wasn’t very tasty. The other seafood was good though. Anne had wine and I had the house made sangria that reminded me of being in Portugal.

I stopped for a few quick things at a grocery to get some wine and a banana for breakfast. Anne was happy with a bit of cheese and cracker and I bought some predone salads of chickpeas, quinoa, tabbouleh, and other healthy looking stuff. We continued watching the miniseries, Chernobyl.

Tomorrow is another travel day – time to go to The Hague in The Netherlands.

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