Wednesday & Thursday, September 28th and 29th

HAMBURG

Wednesday was a long day. First I took a train from Görlitz north to Cottbus, on the single-track railroad north through the woods of east Saxony - mostly beech, oak, and pine. At a tiny burg, the train stopped at the double-track station to let the southbound train go past. 

The train passed a station way out in the boonies of Brandenburg with the sign "Brand - Tropical Islands." Just like that, in English. WTF? So I looked it up later. 

It turns out it's a resort inside a huge HUGE balloon-like structure built for an airship "cargo-lifter" scheme that went bankrupt. It is the 2nd largest building on earth, and the largest without internal supports, located out in the Brandenburg wilderness. It was bought by a Malaysian concern and is now a resort, with the biggest indoor rain forest in the world, a beach, many tropical plants and a number of swimming pools, bars and restaurants inside of it (website here). This is what it will be like for us when we live in a bubble on Mars. 

Why fly to the tropics when you can take the wife and kids on the train from Berlin for a tropical weekend? Pretty amazing.

At Cottbus I "climbed around" (as the Germans say) to the train to Berlin, and there I had to go down to the "tief" tracks way down below the station to find the fast ICE train. It zooms to Hamburg in just two hours. In one stretch is was doing 150 mph. In Hamburg I found the S-Bahn to the Reeperbahn station and schlepped to Axel's airbnb hostel very near the amazing high life of the Reeperbahn. He was at the door to meet me.

He's a big pudgy nice Hamburg guy, showed me everything, and helped me get on his funny wifi. He was effusively helpful, with good English. When I was testing whether I had managed to get on his wifi or not, I went to google maps and randomly put in "Detroit." Axel saw it and said he's been there -- his band played there! At the downtown Ramada on Bagley! They told him if he went outside, not to walk east.

Axel's hostel is a warren of little rooms each with a bed, a TV, and a sink. There are common showers and toilets. It's $35 a night. He said when he bought it 15 years ago it was already a hostel, but he thinks originally it was a whore house, since there are 10  little rooms, each with just a bed and a sink. Makes sense. Plus, it's near the notorious Reeperbahn.

I asked him if there's any area that I should avoid walking in and he said no, everyplace is pretty safe. "Safer than Detroit," he said.

Axel said the harbor was just a few blocks away so I headed in that direction. And WHOA! I found out that I'm right next to Hans Albers Platz! With his statue in the middle! 

I'm pretty sure people who look at this blog don't know who Hans Albers was, but I do because of my interest in old German movies and Schlagermusik. He was a hugely famous singer and actor, a true and beloved son of Hamburg - Hamburg personified. He made over 160 films and was the most famous German film actor of the 1930s and 40s. 

He also had many hits as a singer. Here he is singing "On the Reeperbahn at Half Past Midnight," from the movie of the same name. The clip also shows scenes of the wild nightlife right where I'm staying -- I recognize all the street names. Albers starts singing at about 1:30 on the clip, but at least watch the first part to see what it was like here in 1954 (not 1943 like it says). His singing really sucks, as I'm sure you will agree if you listen to it. (Note the horse having a beer.)

In his Platz there is still a "Kult-Kneipe" (cult pub) with pictures of Albers all over it. He's been dead for over 50 years, and I thought maybe they've milked this way beyond its expiration date, and that nobody younger than me knows who he is, even in Hamburg. But I was WRONG, as I'll explain later.

Here is Albers in his heyday, with co-star Lilian Harvey ("The Sweetest Girl in the World") from the 1932 classic UFA film "Quick". Lilian falls in love with a clown (Albers), but spurns him when he is out of makeup, failing to see it is the same person. Ha ha! What a merry mixup! The whole stinky movie is on Youtube here, for your enjoyment (in German with French subtitles). 

Slade's son has been here in the Reeperbahn area with his band, and he had told me about it. The neighborhood is over-the-top seedy, with dozens of flashy sexy nightclubs, sex shows, sex shops, betting shops, gun shops, and very very many liquor stores and bars. It's also where Beatles-Platz is, since they played here at a few clubs when getting their start in 1960. Everybody here seems so happy! (Not counting the dudes sleeping on the sidewalk with shit stains on the seats of their pants). 

Here are three old dudes almost as old as me (but with more teeth), laughing and yacking and drinking beer off the top of a city trash can.

I bet you always wondered where the Wodka Bomb was invented. Well, here ya go. Reeperbahn, Hamburg.

My hostel room has its window right on the sidewalk, and Axel had left a mint and a pair of earplugs on my pillow. But it's the middle of the week so it's not so bad, and besides, I like the noise. Here are some more pictures of the area

Around the corner on the Platz I saw a bedraggled old lady making mini-pizzas in a wood-fired oven inside a little storefront that said "Pizza 2€" so I ordered two of the veggie ones. They were yummy.

Wednesday I took a tour of the huge complicated harbor on a little boat, watching big cranes load and unload containers from gynormous ships.

As we passed one unbelievably huge self-loading ro-ro container ship, the tour guy said that that ship usually came into port here to load up with "used cars for the Africa market."

The tour boat dropped me off at the Harbor Museum,  a big complex of old-fashioned ships, boats, huge floating cranes, and a big warehouse full of machines and winches and tools and tally-man office equipment and big scales and barrels and boxes and kegs, and sacks of exotic spices and raw rubber, stacked up to the rafters on many shelves. It's all remnants of the way they used to load and unload cargo in the pre-container days. The whole "museum" is being managed and organized and massaged by a bunch of retired port duffers who love this stuff, and it's a huge interesting mess.

I was hungry and there was a sign there for some kind of little gedunk, so I yelled in "Hallo" at the counter and a nice fifty-ish lady came out. I asked if there was anything to eat, and she seemed slightly flustered and asked me if I was a worker on the museum ship. Turns out they really don't serve any food, really, despite what the sign said. 

She asked if she could fix me a nice schmaltz sandwich, and she showed me the schmaltz. It wasn't orange like Spanish manteca - it was just gray fat with onions in it. She said it was delicious and good for you. I said nah. So she said how about a nice frikadelle and some of her home-made potato salad? I said das wäre geil (that'd be cool) so that's what she fixed me, plus a cup of coffee, €5.50. The frikadelle was a hamburger-shaped hunk of tough grisly ground meat, but not un-tasty with mustard. It was fun talking with that jolly lady.

On Thursday after spending three hours in the historical museum, which is very big and thorough, I stopped in at the Hans Albers Cult Pub on his platz near his statue, and had a conversation with the bartender, an older lady (but a lot younger than me). She said Albers used to hang out right there, and she pointed to a wall covered with Hans Albers memorabilia. 

Hans Albers Memorial wall, in his Kneipe

She also put one of his stinky songs on the jukebox, just for me (it was "On the Reeperbahn at Half Past Midnight," so I could act real smart and tell her the year and the movie's name). She claimed young Germans ARE aware of Albers, and come to that place to worship his memory. (Hmm. I think maybe not). As I left, she was serving a large group of young French tourists who, I assure you, had never heard of Hans Albers.

I went over to the nearby Greek restaurant and ordered take-away moussaka for my dinner here at the squat. While I waited, I had a long conversation in Greek with the proprietor, a friendly older guy (but younger than me) who was doing sudoku out of the newspaper. He said Greeks have ALWAYS been in Germany -- for work, for political reasons, and because of shipping. He asked all about where and why I was in Greece. I told him we had a son who was born there and he asked if he was still there - a Greek. Ha ha. The guy is from the Thessaloniki area and has been in Germany for 34 years. Before I left, he insisted that I have an ouzo with him.

Random observations:

Hamburg is FULL of black people and brown people, more than any German city I've seen. But I see very few Chinese/Korean/Japanese-looking people.

If you walk into a drug store and ask for a small package of kleenex, they give you one for free.

All the streets of downtown Hamburg are covered with litter. Little street sweepers patrol the sidewalks at night, but the next day they're all messed up again.

 In the open pedestrian areas near the train station, people (men and women mixed) sit in circles on the pavement and drink beer and wine and talk.

People drink beer and eat on the subway trains. People are walking around on the sidewalks with bottles of beer in their hands all the time. Lots of them. Bars and restaurants have signs that say "All of our cocktails can be ordered to go."