Hamburger

Jo and I drove to Hamburg this past weekend and it was so uneventful I almost did not blog about it, but then I figured why not and wrote a quick one.  We wanted to go to a city in Northern Germany and we had heard good things about Hamburg from some other Americans working with us.  The 4 hour drive ended up taking about 7.5 hours because ze Germans once again decided to close a highway.  No signs indicating the closure or why.  Of course. :-)

• Top left: Here you see people walking around, which tells you how long we went without moving.


• To right: My best attempt to capture the lady peeing on the side of the road.


• Bottom left: The closed highway we wanted to take.


• Bottom middle: Our detour took us through pretty farmland.


• Bottom right: With large piles of potatoes and other items I did not recognize (there were hundreds of these piles).

By the time we got there it was quite late so we just went out for dinner and to walk through their redlight district (of course once you've seen Amsterdam everything else is unimpressive).

• Apparently the Beatles spent some of their early years in Hamburg, so they have these fun picture options.

The next day we went to the fish market, which was quite exciting.  Some fruit vendor threw a banana at me while he tried to keep the crowd excited.  The vendors yell at everyone and throw (what seem to be random) things into bags as they slowly lower the price.  When someone finally raises their hand signaling that they want to buy the bag of goodies, the vendor hands the bag to a helper (and the helper deals with the collecting of monies and distributing of goods) so the vendor can start a new bag.  I honestly have never seen anything like it before.



After that we tried to go to the Rathaus (the main government building for the state of Hamburg) which, according to the guidebooks and the permanent sign on the door, claims to be open on Sundays.  A paper sign on the door informed us that there would be no tours on this day.

• No room at this inn.

Seriously disappointed, we wandered the city and then headed home.

• While wandering we saw the outline of the old city wall and part of it was named Johanniswall...when we got there we found no wall...so Jo is leaning up against her fictitious wall.

Once again, the drive home provided the most fruitful pictures.  We had seen these happy face signs on the way to Budapest but did not get good pictures then.   Here they are in all of their glory.  They indicate to the driver what mood they should be in given the amount of road construction remaining.