Hamburg, Germany

Two weeks from today I will be leaving for Paris!!! :)

I'm going to write about my trip to Hamburg in list form, so here we go:

3:30am: Wake up
5:18am: Board regional train to Hamburg, via stopover in Schwerin.

After a couple hours of darkness, we finally got to see the German countryside!  It was so nice to see the wide open landscape, farms, and cute houses.  It reminded me of the drive from home to the lake, just with prettier houses.

9:28 Arrival in Hamburg, where were were greeted by 6 giant posters (a few stories high, each) of David Beckham hanging from the top of the Hauptbahnhof (main train station).  Who can complain.

10:00 A bit hungry, we stopped at a bakery to be German and get some pastries.  This one's called the Kopenhagener - I'll have to consult Lis to see if there's a reason behind that.

10:30 We then visited the Rathaus (town hall), which is one of the main sites in Hamburg.  It's a really small, riverside town which grew (back in the day) because it was one of main ports in Germany.  This town hall finished construction in 1897 and still houses Hamburg's mayor, senate, and parliament (evidently the city has it's own).

Sorry for the poor quality; I could only get the whole building in the shot if I used my iphone! 

11:30 Next we meandered throughout the town and found St. Michael's church - the city's other landmark.  We bought a pass to go up to its observation deck, from which we had great views of the city and the port.

Despite this photo looking like I photoshopped myself in, I was actually there.

After braving this cold we got some lunch - my travel partners wanted to eat Hamburgers (get it..) so I had french fries for lunch.  Afterwards, I had snickers flavored gelato and it was de-licious!!  After eating all of that unhealthy food, we did some shopping and I got a new pair of running/tri shorts.

We then decided that we'd take an earlier train back to Berlin because we were cold and had kind of run out of things to see (since we excluded visiting the museums).

Notably, people in Hamburg are much more friendly than in Berlin, so that was refreshing.  Overall, it was a good day trip.

These next few days will be spent doing copious amounts of work in preparation for midterms, so that when Lis arrives on Friday I can spend lots of quality best friend time with her!