I popped up to Hamburg on the weekend, in the same way manner one might casually decide to run a half-marathon. No, I was visiting my adopted brother Matze, who's writing his this on lasers. About lasers, I should clarify, not with lasers; that'd be too cool.
Anyway, I knocked off work early on Friday and spent the 6 hour train journey productively sleeping and reading old newspapers. Went back to the apartment Matze shares with his girlfriend, where, in a powerful display of geekdom, we all pulled out our laptops and showed each other YouTube videos until the wee hours.
Saturday we (well, I) slept in and had a leisurely breakfast together. Matze wanted to go to an exhibition with me while the ladies (another friend from Stuttgart had just moved to Hamburg but had crashed here until she could get into her digs) did whatever ladies do on Saturday afternoons -- but first, we had football to watch! An Werder Bremen team decimated by injuries and in a form slump was going up against Bayern Munich team that had spent more money on new players than the rest of the league combined: it was going to be great! And it was.
Bremen held out for the first half, and only trailed 0-1 at the break. In the second half, though, Bayern put another 3 on top of that with attractive -- not just effective -- attacking football. A joy to watch, especially Franck Ribery. The man is a footballing wonder. The only video summary I've found of the match in is.. Flemish (?), but pay particular attention to Ribery's trick at the 2:08 mark (repeated in slow-mo at 2:26). Just terrific.
Anyway, after watching that game it was too late to go the exhibition, so we wandered through the inner city a little. Starting out at the Hauptbahnhof, opposite the Theater
we wandered down through St. Georg, a rather seedy quarter with a mish-mash of cultures, and some quite interesting office buildings
From the subway station that last photo was taken from we walked the two stops back to the apartment. When they built the underground tunnels they just dumped a bunch of dirt on top and left a long, thin park behind. And some strange sculptures of birds. Which is nice.
At home we watched the highlights of the day's other matches and compared our football tipping results, then ate a hearty dinner with .. wait for it .. pudding! Yes, that's right -- a German household with a pudding dish! Rike, Matze's girlfriend, had found it in an antique store for 8€, and her first pud wasn't bad at all. Apple Caramel, for the record -- mmm, mmm!
Pleasantly stuffed, all three of us caught the train to St. Pauli (me without a ticket, oooh) to visit the Hamburg Dom, a big old fairground thing of the type the Germans love so. We rode the biggest transportable Ferris wheel in the world: 60 meters tall it was! A shame it was night (and that I left my digital camera in Heidelberg), otherwise I could have gotten some great shots of the city.
Matze was too full and Rike too mistrusting of Carny folks' engineering skills to go on any more rides, so we just wandered through the fairground and looked at all the pretty lights. One of the rides looked preeeetty familiar from Oktoberfest... I'll let you be the judge. Left is Hamburg, right is Munich.
St. Pauli is probably the most famous suburb in Hamburg. As well as having a decent football team, it also has an imposing above-ground bunker upon which AA Guns were mounted during the war. The bunker is above ground because the soil was rubbish for digging, so it's a fortress of a place. It would have cost so much to tear it down that the Government decided to leave it standing. No idea what they do with it.
The bunker, the fairground, the St. Pauli Stadium and the St. Pauli subway station are all within a stone's throw from (the top of) the Ferris Wheel, so check them out if you're in Hamburg. There's also a big statue of Otto von Bismarck, but he probably doesn't mean much to most non-Germans.
The real reason St. Pauli is famous, however, is culture of an entirely different sort. For a stretch of about a mile (where they used to make ropes for ships), there is a street called the "Reeperbahn" (also the "Kietz" or just "the Mile"), which is possibly the most frequented red-light district in Germany. Until we annex Holland, that is -- bwahahaha!
But back to the German prostitutes: it's not just strip clubs and sex shops (though there are an awful lot), but also "regular" clubs. On a Saturday night the street was as you'd expect it, and not being people people (yes, that's right) we just made our way through the throng to the river.
Hamburg is a coastal town (or close enough), so to get a good view of the Kietz we wandered underneath the river Elbe in a tunnel that would not be out of place in existentialist dream sequences anyone happens to be filming.
Our feet were getting pretty sore by then, so we made our way back home via the U-Bahn. Rike got a little freaked out when three burly ticket inspectors got on, but a) they were only following a guy who'd been smoking on the station -- naughty! and b) since it was now Sunday, my train ticket back to Heidelberg let me (legally) use public transport :-)
Sunday we got up a little earlier and finally made it to the exhibition. It's by an Austrian artist called Erwin Wurm (check the wik for details), and played a lot with perception and points of view. You couldn't take photos in the gallery, but good examples of the kind of surreal stuff Wurm does can be found in the music video to "Can't Stop" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Especially cool was a "fat car" sculpture, which was a red Porsche (fat in the sense of "phat") that looked like it had ingested nothing but marshmallows for a year: fat in the sense of bloated.
My favourite, though, was his "House Attack" sculpture: a small upside down house, tilted at 45° or so, where you could look in the window. Inside that room half the furniture was the correct way up (i.e. on the floor of the upside down house), and half was on the ceiling (which was at the bottom). The juxtaposition of the two, combined with the angle of the house, the angle of the ceiling (it was a peaked roof, so the room was pentagonal), and the view of the outside world through the other windows was marvellously disorienting. Really well done.
That was pretty much my Hamburg visit. I did see afunky funny ad for a "multi-funk pouch"
Evidently it can store not just regular old James-Brown-funk, but also more complicated funks that other pouches just can't handle. Herbie-Hancock-Jazz-Funk, perhaps? Tower-of-Power-Funk? Slap-bass-fusion-funk? At last, one pouch to carry my Rick James, my Bootsy Collins, and my Jamiroquai. Huzzah!
----------------
Now playing: The Puppini Sisters - Jeepers Creepers
Anyway, I knocked off work early on Friday and spent the 6 hour train journey productively sleeping and reading old newspapers. Went back to the apartment Matze shares with his girlfriend, where, in a powerful display of geekdom, we all pulled out our laptops and showed each other YouTube videos until the wee hours.
Saturday we (well, I) slept in and had a leisurely breakfast together. Matze wanted to go to an exhibition with me while the ladies (another friend from Stuttgart had just moved to Hamburg but had crashed here until she could get into her digs) did whatever ladies do on Saturday afternoons -- but first, we had football to watch! An Werder Bremen team decimated by injuries and in a form slump was going up against Bayern Munich team that had spent more money on new players than the rest of the league combined: it was going to be great! And it was.
Bremen held out for the first half, and only trailed 0-1 at the break. In the second half, though, Bayern put another 3 on top of that with attractive -- not just effective -- attacking football. A joy to watch, especially Franck Ribery. The man is a footballing wonder. The only video summary I've found of the match in is.. Flemish (?), but pay particular attention to Ribery's trick at the 2:08 mark (repeated in slow-mo at 2:26). Just terrific.
Anyway, after watching that game it was too late to go the exhibition, so we wandered through the inner city a little. Starting out at the Hauptbahnhof, opposite the Theater
From the subway station that last photo was taken from we walked the two stops back to the apartment. When they built the underground tunnels they just dumped a bunch of dirt on top and left a long, thin park behind. And some strange sculptures of birds. Which is nice.
At home we watched the highlights of the day's other matches and compared our football tipping results, then ate a hearty dinner with .. wait for it .. pudding! Yes, that's right -- a German household with a pudding dish! Rike, Matze's girlfriend, had found it in an antique store for 8€, and her first pud wasn't bad at all. Apple Caramel, for the record -- mmm, mmm!
Pleasantly stuffed, all three of us caught the train to St. Pauli (me without a ticket, oooh) to visit the Hamburg Dom, a big old fairground thing of the type the Germans love so. We rode the biggest transportable Ferris wheel in the world: 60 meters tall it was! A shame it was night (and that I left my digital camera in Heidelberg), otherwise I could have gotten some great shots of the city.
Matze was too full and Rike too mistrusting of Carny folks' engineering skills to go on any more rides, so we just wandered through the fairground and looked at all the pretty lights. One of the rides looked preeeetty familiar from Oktoberfest... I'll let you be the judge. Left is Hamburg, right is Munich.
St. Pauli is probably the most famous suburb in Hamburg. As well as having a decent football team, it also has an imposing above-ground bunker upon which AA Guns were mounted during the war. The bunker is above ground because the soil was rubbish for digging, so it's a fortress of a place. It would have cost so much to tear it down that the Government decided to leave it standing. No idea what they do with it.
The bunker, the fairground, the St. Pauli Stadium and the St. Pauli subway station are all within a stone's throw from (the top of) the Ferris Wheel, so check them out if you're in Hamburg. There's also a big statue of Otto von Bismarck, but he probably doesn't mean much to most non-Germans.
The real reason St. Pauli is famous, however, is culture of an entirely different sort. For a stretch of about a mile (where they used to make ropes for ships), there is a street called the "Reeperbahn" (also the "Kietz" or just "the Mile"), which is possibly the most frequented red-light district in Germany. Until we annex Holland, that is -- bwahahaha!
But back to the German prostitutes: it's not just strip clubs and sex shops (though there are an awful lot), but also "regular" clubs. On a Saturday night the street was as you'd expect it, and not being people people (yes, that's right) we just made our way through the throng to the river.
Hamburg is a coastal town (or close enough), so to get a good view of the Kietz we wandered underneath the river Elbe in a tunnel that would not be out of place in existentialist dream sequences anyone happens to be filming.
Our feet were getting pretty sore by then, so we made our way back home via the U-Bahn. Rike got a little freaked out when three burly ticket inspectors got on, but a) they were only following a guy who'd been smoking on the station -- naughty! and b) since it was now Sunday, my train ticket back to Heidelberg let me (legally) use public transport :-)
Sunday we got up a little earlier and finally made it to the exhibition. It's by an Austrian artist called Erwin Wurm (check the wik for details), and played a lot with perception and points of view. You couldn't take photos in the gallery, but good examples of the kind of surreal stuff Wurm does can be found in the music video to "Can't Stop" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Especially cool was a "fat car" sculpture, which was a red Porsche (fat in the sense of "phat") that looked like it had ingested nothing but marshmallows for a year: fat in the sense of bloated.
My favourite, though, was his "House Attack" sculpture: a small upside down house, tilted at 45° or so, where you could look in the window. Inside that room half the furniture was the correct way up (i.e. on the floor of the upside down house), and half was on the ceiling (which was at the bottom). The juxtaposition of the two, combined with the angle of the house, the angle of the ceiling (it was a peaked roof, so the room was pentagonal), and the view of the outside world through the other windows was marvellously disorienting. Really well done.
That was pretty much my Hamburg visit. I did see a
Evidently it can store not just regular old James-Brown-funk, but also more complicated funks that other pouches just can't handle. Herbie-Hancock-Jazz-Funk, perhaps? Tower-of-Power-Funk? Slap-bass-fusion-funk? At last, one pouch to carry my Rick James, my Bootsy Collins, and my Jamiroquai. Huzzah!
----------------
Now playing: The Puppini Sisters - Jeepers Creepers
No comments:
Post a Comment