My first few days in Hamburg have been very nice indeed. I arrived on Thursday afternoon, only to find that I had left my laptop charger safely in the Columbus airport. So the first order of business was to track down a store that sold Apple products. This was a bit of a pain, and I had to take a cab across the city. All in all though, I am the proud new owner of a MacBook charger which will need an adapter if it is to work in America. So it goes, as they say.
The hotel was about as I'd expected, although the neighborhood is a bit...rowdy. The best way that I can describe it is a combination of 6th St. in Austin, the ``Lovely Ladies'' routine from Les Miserables, a Husler mail order catalog, and a Turkish street bazaar. If you're not sure, you should check out
Reeperbahn on Wikipedia (this is the street where the hotel is located).
Apparently, the Beatles played several gigs here before they were discovered. The fact that they were actually from Liverpool seems to be lost on the locals, though. There is a nice plaza ``Beatles Platz'' adjacent to my hotel. I took this picture looking through Ringo's head, down the ``sinful mile'':
Yesterday I spent walking around on the waterfront, which is underutilized as it is in Galveston. This is a memorial to lost seamen, near as I can tell:
The port of Hamburg is pretty busy, and during business hours there was a lot of water traffic. The city is the third largest port in Europe, and has been for quite some time. Either way, the maritime tradition is evident, at least on the waterfront.
Yesterday and today I spent a good deal of time writing my talk for the conference next week, mostly enjoying German food and beer in sidewalk cafes...
Hopefully I'll have a bit more time to take better pictures once I'm finished writing this talk. Otherwise, all is well.
A few days ago, I took the train to see a monument that I had heard about: St. Nikolai's Church, in Hamburg:
St. Niolai Church in Hamburg (or Nikolaikirche) was finished in 1863, and was the tallest building in the world for a few years.
It was largely destroyed in July 1943 when Allied forces heavily bombed the city. While the city did house a naval base, many parts of the city (including some predominantly civilian areas) was leveled.
Today, what's left of the main spire and the nave are open to the public, and has been turned into a memorial.
The spire is covered in soot, and still bears the scars from Allied bomb shrapnel, and stands as a testament to the horrors of war.
For a few euro, you can ride an elevator to the top of the spire, where there's a small observation deck and some information about the church's construction, and the bombing campaign that destroyed most of the city. The view really is quite impressive:
