Category: Trip

In case I forgot to mention, we’re all reasonably exhausted after the go-go-go of the last ten days. Today’s activities did nothing to alleviate this! We started with a cruise on The Alster, one of Hamburgs two rivers. 

 
Hamburg is proud of this river and treat it well. Home to birds and with a beautiful shoreline, the two-hour cruise gave us a good look at the two lakes formed by the river as well as the  many canals. 

 
Were we here longer, and were the weather cooler, it would be fun to rent a boat and explore the canals myself 🙂 

 
Afterwards we split up again, with Dad going to see the catholic cathedral, Jim off to the botanic gardens and the three youngsters (average age 44!) off to The Reeperbaum, a red-light district that is a major tourist attraction.

We boggled at the sights before eventually ending up at our destination: Germany’s oldest waxworks! 

 
I’d never ever been to a waxworks. It was surreal and a lot of fun! 

 
While many of the models were German historical or celebrity figures, there were still many world-famous ‘people’ on the four floors that we knew. 

 
That’s apparently life-sized, a famous cross-dresser that runs (?) many clubs on The Reeperbaum. It’s rare someone dwarfs Bernard 🙂

Afterwards… we ended up back at the fair! 

 
He’s emerging from ‘Geister’, a surprisingly scary ghost-train ride. The glasses have diffracting lenses to give the strobes a rainbow effect. It was fun 🙂 

 
That’s taken in a mirror maze. Can you tell the real from the reflection?

It got hot when we were at the fair, and we all started dropping like old flowers. With a very early train tomorrow, it’s an early night tonight!

Like kings, we rode today in first class seats to Germany’s largest port (and second largest city) Hamburg. 

 
That’s the Rathaus (town hall) which is the most spectacular we’ve seen so far. It’s surrounded by shopping and adjacent to two large ‘lakes’ on which boats cruise and swans swim. 

   
Although dozens of miles from the ocean, Hamburg is a major sea port and also features many canals… 

 
And churches… 

 
More about both of the tomorrow (hopefully)! 

 
That’s a rare shot of the five of us together, taken using a handy mirror in our (lively) hotel. This was just prior to visiting a destination that is so popular it needs advance registration: Miniature Wonderland. 

 
This is a place that has ultra detailed miniature dioramas on display, many of which include model train sets. 

 
There’s dozens of themed displays on two levels, each of which features hundreds of buildings and vehicles and countless tiny people. Each of these are massive and it would take days to see everything there was to see in a given scene.

The attention to detail is astounding, and what makes it even more amazing is that virtually everything is hand created. There’s also a day/night schedule. The displays light up with thousands of LED and fiber optic lights when the sun goes down. Here’s a day/night example of a rock concert, which itself is only a portion of a much bigger display: 

   
Miniature Wonderland is crazy in the best way, and certainly worth a visit if you’re in Hamburg.

Afterward we were all tired, but I had used my large nose to sniff out the existence of Germany’s largest fair, open in Hamburg right now. I had to go! So while B and Dad went to crash at the hotel, J, K and me headed to St Pauli (the red light district) and the giant fair called ‘The Dom’. 

 
Now I’m super tired right now, so I’ll just say it was pretty amazing how large some of the (portable!) rides were. 

 
And how complex some of the fun houses were. 

 
And how many (pretty, flashing) lights there were. 

 
And how much fun the Euro Coaster was to ride 🙂

We looked at everything and ate fair food and rode that one ride but eventually failed our saving throws against exhaustion and had to call it a day. 

 
Tomorrow’s our only full day here. I’m looking forward to it 🙂

I enjoy writing postcards at laundromats, and have done this many times in the past. As I was doing it this morning it occurred to me that I had done a poor job of keeping track of postcards this trip. The only solution is to start from scratch, so keep your eyes on your mailboxes 🙂

Today was another long day in which we criss-crossed Berlin to see a variety of sights, starting with the Brandenburg Gate: 

 
This is an icon of Germany, and has stood here for over 200 years. It’s much bigger than I expected, and very impressive. KLS says “I like how it has different carvings in each archway”

A short walk south of the gate brought us here: 

 
This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a controversial installation of over 2700 concrete blocks in memorium of the Jewish Holocaust victims. 

 
Without commenting on the controversies, or even the appropriateness of the memorial, I have to say the maze itself is eerie and effective in making you feel isolated and even imprisoned (there are emergency underground exits). It’s not a place I will soon forget.

KLS says “It’s thought provoking”.

Five minutes north, back past the Brandenburg Gate, is the Reichstag building – the German Capital building: 

 
The dome on the top is open to the public and is said to provide great views of Berlin but… it’s by appointment only and we didn’t book ahead. So we were only able to appreciate the building from a distance! KLS says “It’s just a building“.

After lunch (and two train rides) we arrived at the next destination: 

 
This is the Victory Column, erected about 140 years ago to celebrate Gernan war victories. It can be climbed via an internal spiral staircase, but the line was long and in oppressive heat so we didn’t wait. KLS says of the column “They need better line management“.

Getting to the column (which stands on an island in a busy traffic intersection) requires navigating an underground tunnel which contained a nifty interactive light installation: 

 
Of these lights KLS says “They were like, you know, retro high tech art“.

Some random transit shots… 

    
 
The middle photo shows a typical sandwich/pastry shop common in train stations. Many delicious items have been purchased at stores such as these 🙂

The last attraction of the day deserves a blog post of its own, and therefore (probably!) will when I return. I speak of the ‘Computer Game Museum’, and it’s exhibit which promised to evolve us into Homo Lindebs Digitalis. I’ll leave you in suspense as to whether it worked but tease you with a single shot: 

 
Berlin is great and I could spend many more days here, but tomorrow we travel west to a port city. I wonder what wonders we will see?