Hamburg, Germany

We heard from several Viking cruise travelers that the Miniatur Wunderland trains were something not to miss in Hamburg. They require a reserved time slot and so when we went to get our Hamburg card they were able to reserve a time for us this morning. It was amazing, with over a million man hours and counting to put together. It is arranged by countries. The cars and trucks follow the lanes, stop at signs and change lanes with traffic. At one point a tunnel starts to smoke and all of the emergency vehicles come to the fire. A staggering 9.5 miles of track. The lights dim regularly and the effect of seeing 385,000 LEDs all lit up is so cool. There are over 1,000 trains and 9,200 cars.

From Wunderland we walked to the St. Nikolai Church. It was the target of allied bombing in WWII. It created a firestorm which took out most of the inner city of Hamburg in July of 1943. Remarkably the spire was not destroyed like the rest of the church. There was a very comprehensive museum in the basement where the church used to stand. Bryan went up in an elevator to the top of the spire. It is the 5th tallest in Europe and was the tallest for a long time.

The harbor is fascinating to us landlocked folks. We saw loading, ships coming in and the dry docks. Unfortunately it is true that Hamburg is a city of German tourists. We had an all German tour and apparently the guide was funny.

On the port tour we saw the Elbphilharmonie and so we walked there next. For free you can go up the dotted escalators and walk around the outside with views. To take a tour of the inside takes two weeks at least to get tickets. It would have been a good thing to do.

City Hall or Rathaus is huge with a large square out front. It was built in 1897 and survived the bombings.

We ate this evening close to the Operettenhaus in the St. Pauli area. The Freidenhaus restaurant had good German food and an eclectic neighborhood. It was party central all around us. We watched a girl park in the middle of the road and the police came to give her a ticket. On the opposite corner was a sex shop. What a people watching spot. After dinner we greatly enjoyed the production of Hamilton in German.