Non cruise-ship Hamburg

Last Saturday, Ken and I went with our friends Meggan and Susan on a brief tour of Hamburg. We explored some of the less toured parts of the city. I used the term in the title because we have faced the dilemma lately of how to tour Europe. Do we spend a lot of time in a few places or do what cruise ships do and go to a lot of places for a short amount of time? We are somewhat settling on the latter with our travel plans. We are going to be going to a number of different places over the next 2-3 months for 2-4 day weekend trips. Then in the future, we can come back to Europe and go in-depth on the places that we like the most in our overview trips.

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.Since we live in Hamburg, we decided that we want to know the sights and sounds of this city better than a cruise ship. These are the sorts of things that you'd do on our 4th and 5th days in Hamburg and never see if you were just here 1-2 days. The first was the old Elbe tunnel. It was build in 1911 to link Hamburg to the towns on the south side of the river. There is an elevator system that takes the cars down into the tunnel and back up, as you can see in the pictures. All parts of the tunnel are very narrow. US cars would have trouble here.

After that, we took advantage of the beautiful day and went to walk the steps of Blankenase. Hamburg is divided into "Stadteils" that each have their own name. I would describe them as sub-cities or, as Ken puts it, like small versions of the Burroughs of New York. We live in Harvestehude. Blankenase is another. This part of Hamburg was where the rich fishing merchants resided many years ago. The houses are built into the sides of steep cliffs. There are some roads, but most of the "streets" on the map are footpath stairways. They even have street signs for the various stairways and some people have addresses on the stairs. As we walked up and down the hundreds of steps, it really hit me that this is EUROPE. We don't have anything like this in Indiana. I haven't traveled New England, so maybe they have these sorts of towns, but I've never seen them.

I found it amusing to see that one family had steps and a path over another house to get to theirs.

After our hike, Ken dropped me off at church for IBC's Women's ministry event. We had a little time, so he and Susan decided to see if two former cheerleaders could still stunt. She cheered for Virginia Tech. Since I didn't know Ken in his lifting days, I was thrilled finally get to see him lift. They both did great. This picture is my favorite. Ken lifting another person with only one hand. Impressive.

Kristy