Hamburg!

country count!

Trip: 3

Life: 14

My trip to Hamburg was not my first trip to Germany, but it was VERY different from what I had seen of the country before. When my family and I did our grand alps tour in 2006 we stopped in Bovaria briefly. It was all mountains and Leiderhosen, which is not Hamburg at all. This city is an economic powerhouse, and has been basically since it was founded by Charlemagne in the 800s. We did a lot of things while we were there and I have a TON of pictures but I'm just going to pick out the things that struck me while I was there.

We started out our time in Hamburg by going on a walking tour of the city, which was cool but freezing. Northern Europe has been pummelled by absurd amounts of snow (kinda like home). These pictures are all from St. Nicholas' church which used to be one of Hamburgs jewels but was destroyed during the bombing of the city during WWII. Today it stands as an eerie reminder of that period of the cities history. Its also in the dead center of the city, Like St. Patricks in NYC.

We then took a boat tour of the Harbor which was slightly terrifying given the absurd amount of ice we were driving through. You could hear it scraping along the hull the whole time, and people kept nervously making titanic references. I didnt include pictures but the harbor tour was mostly an intro to how obscenely productive Hamburg is, and gave us our first glance at how rich the city really is.



If we didn't get the message then our tour of "townhall" the next day drove the message home. Their town hall has more rooms than buckingham palace and was built in the mid 1800s after a fire destroyed the old one.

Its also connected through this courtyard to the stock exchange. Thats the building you see behind the fountain, slightly less impressive. The fountain is a dedicated to the people who died in the Cholera Epedimic. Its quite breathtaking.

This picture is also from the city hall, from the enterence to the Senate Chamber. If you look above the door, you can see the slogan "gott mit uns" which our German tour guide explained meant "god with us" in German. She said it showed the importance that Christianity in the workings of the Hamburg government at the time the town hall was built. When we got back on the bus, our professor who was Danish told us that that saying had a very different connotation in Denmark, because it had been imprinted on the belt buckles of all the Nazi soldiers and was now permenantly associated with them.

That leads me to the final thing we did in Germany, which was a visit to the Neuengamme concentration camp which is like 30 minutes out side Hamburg. It was not at all what I expected, although I dont know what I expected to be honest. It was a labor camp, not an extermination camp, and it was where teh majority of Danish political prisoners were held. The camp had 106,000 prisoners around 55,000 who last their lives. After the war it was immediately changed into a regular prison and the Cremetorium and the barricks were taken down. The tour guide was extremely good, and set on telling us the whole story, which made it extremely different than other tellings of the holocaust that I had heard previously.

Malmo Trip :)

So yesterday was the first international travelling I've done since I got here. This is really dorky but I want to keep track of the number of countries I visit while I'm here, so I'm going to start numbering them so Sweden would be:

Trip-2

Life-14

Its a bit stupid really but its actually harder to keep track of then I would've thought and I want to remember the order in which I visit places for when I'm looking back.


Malmo was an interesting experience. Getting there was the easiest thing in the world, we litteraly just bought a $30 roundtrip ticket, got on the regional train and just commuted into Sweden. It was like less formal than taking the Mark Train to Baltimore. When we got to the train station in Sweden there were absolutely no customs, which was a good thing because 2 of the people I went with had forgotten their passports.

When we got there we made a b-line for the castle which turned out to be a VERY bizzare museum. It didn't help that absolutely everything was in Swedish. There were only about 4 rooms of the castle dedicated to castle like things and then the rest of the building was divided up into the most eclectic mix of exhibits possible. In the basement there was an aquarium, there was a section didicated to the history of Swedish labor struggles, a special exhibit on Nelson Mandela, a room dedicated to a detailed look at the different stages of pregnancy and some dinosaur replicas thrown in there. All of us felt kind of like we were in the twilight zone, it was a strange experience to say the least. But the rest of Malmo was lovely, even though it was freezing.


This is the square where we ate dinner its dark so its kind of hard to see. Malmo was danish territory for a long period of its history so alot of the city layout looks a lot like Copenhagen, with open plats and so on.

This is a cool set of bronze statues that look like a marching band, one of the famous malmo attractions, so I'm told.

This is the Malmo train station, where we got in. Its really pretty and surrounded by canals which are supposed to be lovely in the summer but are completely frozen over right now.

This is the turning torso, its avery famous building. I'm not really one for abstract architecture to be honest, but it seems to be a big thing in scandinavia. A lot of my friends at the hojskole are architecture students, so its kind of what the area is known for. in Copenhagen we have the Black Diamond, which is the new royal library and its also a very famous building. This was cool though, and completely redefined the Malmo skyline. I'm curious about how the people of the town reacted when it was first being built.