Hamburg - Day 1

We woke up fairly early and after a quick breakfast, we went out to explore the city. We decided to walk to the SBahn station instead of taking the bus and came across some really nice parks. The weather was nice, the sun was shining, the day promised to be great.

We started off our tour by visiting the Altstadt. We walked around the Rathaus and sat down for a quick snack at a restaurant overlooking one of the canals. It had started to rain a little, but cleared up again really quickly. The area around the Rathaus was really nice, with cobblestone pedestrian streets and interesting looking buildings.

From there we walked on to the Hafen city, just taking it all in. Hamburg had a very young vibe to it, and walking around its streets was particularly relaxing. I think there is something to it when you’re constantly surrounded by water. We spent most of the day just wandering around on streets and the canals, stopping often to just relax and put our feet up.

Our main tourist attraction for the day was the miniature museum, where entire cities are built in miniature size. The amount of detail that went into the work is astounding. I wonder how long it takes them to build these cities. It’s all really well made, with the light constantly changing to mimic the 24 hour day.

​After our little tour, we headed off to get some seafood for Hussein. We walked down the main promenade, unfortunately the weather had a taken a turn for the worse. It was cloudy and raining lightly. We passed by many stalls that sold fish sandwiches and somewhere towards the end, Hussein picked one and had himself a fried fish sandwich. According to him it was alright, nothing special.

​I was pretty exhausted and my feet had swelled to the size of two large balloons, so decided to head home to rest before the evening.

The evening found us in Hamburg’s red light district. We started off at St. Pauli’s and walked onto the Reeperbahn. It was still relatively early in the evening but already the working ladies were out and about. There were bright lights everywhere, music, bachelor parties under way, and other tourists like us. We walked up and down, looking at the women, the punks and the drag queens. We had started to get a little hungry and so started looking into the alleyways to find somewhere to eat. We found this cute little Spanish place, which had a very authentic feel to it. Right outside of it on the sidewalk were a group of people singing and playing typical Andalusian music. We had a few tapas which tasted quite good, enjoyed the relaxing atmosphere before heading out to the Reeperbahn again.

After one last walk around, we decided to call it a night and headed home.