Gointravelin's travel blogs:
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A city of architecture
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What a great start to the weekend. The train to Stansted airport was delayed and on a Friday afternoon - as you can imagine, that is ALOT of people waiting around, so when the train was finally ready to go - it was very full. So the pleasant 45 min ride turned into over an hour standing jammed in with no room to move. Not a nice way to start the weekend. Jenelle ended up sitting on her bag, jammed in behind some guy who kept leaning back on her. Not nice.
Arrived into Hamburg at midnight and thankfully the youth hostel was very nice and conveniently located near an underground stop, much easier than we anticipated. The next morning we started the sight seeing as recommended by most of the guide books. Unfortunately I think they oversold it. Though Hamburg is a nice city there isn't that much that grabs you and makes you say 'wow'. After a wander through the shopping area (expensive stuff) we reached the town hall, it was nice on the outside but much more opulent on the inside. From there we headed to the old storage warehouses on the canals passing several churches on the way, only one was impressive but that was due to the fact all that remains is the spire, the rest got destroyed in the bombings during the war. The warehouses were impressive but again just some buildings now populated by Asians selling carpets (as if we didn't see enough of that in China!!). We then walked to the waterfront and I began to notice the architecture. Though there is not many old buildings and something lacking from the town as a whole it does have an interesting mix of new and old buildings, with many of the new funky styles being built near the waterfront.
Again consulting the guide book and we had already finished their suggested 1st day of sight seeing and it was only lunch so we headed up to the exclusive shopping area which is the equal of Bond St (or so it said). The shops where numerous and exclusive so it was just looking, apparently Hamburg has the highest number of millionaires in Germany. We read about the largest electronics shop in the world and shoe shop with 3 floors so we went looking (how hard can it be to find shops that big?? - very hard it turns out!) but couldn't find them.
After asking someone, we found out they were back where we started!! so we headed back this time past the lake which was nice but it had started to rain so we didn't stop. The shoe shop was huge but I couldn't find anything I liked that fit me, not sure if it's big feet or the Germans are just small. (You know what they say about big feet) The electronics place was 4 floors and I'm not sure if it was the biggest in the world, but it was pretty big. Spent some time looking at a few things, trying out the massage chair etc. By this time it was getting late so time to pull out the guide book and find a restaurant.
The area recommended didn't have much to offer only 2 local, kinda German places, and the rest where Italian or Portuguese. So picking the better looking of the pubs we settled in for a night of drinking beer and eating some of the local food, that took about 2 hours to get to us once ordered. Then back to the hostel for a good nights sleep.
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