HAMBURG – Germany (Sat 08 Aug)

We left Berlin today. We were well impressed with her. An interesting city of contrasts, alongside the staunch Germanic attitudes that you expect, there are the examples of free form individualism, for which Berlin (in particular) has become known. And they seem to cohabitate together so well. There is a recent history here that everyone is aware of, and it is interesting to see how they deal with it. It appears as if they put it out there, as if to say ‘this is how it is, this is what has happened, we are what we are, and now it is time to move on’, and they have moved on so well. Berlin really is a great place.

But we must press on to Hamburg. We arrived at our hotel and the first thing we did was to get the directions in to town to try and relieve ourselves from the mundane drive up. We were told that there was a bit of a festival on, so we thought that would be a good place to start. When we stepped off the S-Bahn we discovered what the receptionist was talking about. We stepped straight into the middle of the ‘Gaynation’ parade, otherwise known as ‘Hamburg Pride’. This was certainly an interesting experience, with more ‘fabulous’ people there than you can imagine. The street was lined with tents alternating between food stalls, drink stalls, and mobile dance parties. As well as the ‘fabulous’ there was the … provocative :-) There was an older guy there of 60 plus dancing very enthusiastically wearing nothing more than a very, very small sock, doing his best to find himself a mate we suspected. We had the impression that he had started on the bottle very early in the day.

From here we headed to the other side of town, via the port. It really is nice to see the sea again. On this side of town it was a different story altogether. There was a free concert going on which was 100 percent, total, retro rock at full volume. A completely different demographic on this side of town, but just as much food and drink available. We sat around and listened for a while before heading home. Unfortunately some of the young rockers at the S-Bahn station had over estimated their alcoholic capacity, so it was getting a bit messy down there.

As well as the usual inebriated results, we ended up having completely random conversations with people, people that were totally unaware that we had absolutely no comprehension of a single word of their monologues. I think as far as they were concerned we had participated in a worthwhile conversation, and were well on the way to securing world peace.