Weekend in Hamburg

We spent our first weekend during this trip in Hamburg, visiting the daughter of our Oldenburg friends (she spent a year at Stanford while in school, where she spent quite a bit of time with us).  She's a doctor, at the level I think we would call a resident (the German system is quite different, with students starting med school right out of high school), becoming an anesthesiologist/ intensive care specialist/ (maybe) palliative care specialist (in the German system these are all subspecialities of anesthesiology).  We wanted to catch up on her life and also see a bit of Hamburg (we last visited her and the city three years ago).

We were rewarded with a weekend of rain (and it wasn't even raining in Duisburg, where our apartment is -- the unfairness of it all!).  That didn't stop us from wandering around the Außenalster (a lake about 6km circumference) and into downtown (thank god for Germans being really into coffee shops and other places to warm up in) and then along the Reeperbahn (a long street by the harbor, which is an interesting combination of night clubs, restaurants, and sex shops) and finally to the St. Michaelis church (the best known, and very well preserved, church in Hamburg)  The highlight was visiting the Elbphilharmonie, a brand new, very distinctive concert hall, that's becoming a city landmark and place that people come from all over Europe to visit.  It was nearly a decade late and had huge cost overruns, but the current concensus is that it was worth it.  Given the dreariness of the day, none of my pictures are worth sharing, but here is a view off the internet (that was definitely taken from a boat in the harbor, which I also didn't have access to).




It's meant to look like a wave. You can walk around on a deck at the level where the brown concrete meets the glass section.  In addition to at least two concert halls (we weren't able to go inside them -- it appeared that you needed to book a guided tour to do that), the usual cafes, there is also a very pricey hotel in the building -- the ideal place to stay if you travel across Germany for a concert.  Unfortunately, you have to book concert tickets about six months in advance, so we weren't able to attend any concerts.  Our friend had gotten special "locals" tickets when it first opened, and saw a Yoyo Ma concert there.  She thought the acoustics were fantastic.

My fitbit told me I got 33 000 steps that day (almost all of it in the rain), so it was a long day.

We also got to experience a couple of very nice restaurants and a night club.  Friday night we went to Hunter's Bar and Grill, a South African steak place (is there even one South African restaurant in all of the Bay Area?  Probably, but I don't know where it might be).  The South Africans know their meat and know how to season it.  They are a grilling culture.  I had a shrimp curry that was excellent and Jay had the advertised steak.  One oddity.  In a place with an English name, there were no English menus -- the standard menu was in Afrikaans and German.

Saturdat night we went to the restaurant in the Hotel east.  The room has won design awards (as you can see from the picture below).  Very hip, but also excellent food, including some very good sushi and sashimi.  After some sushi appetizers, we all had the salmon.  Our friend thought it might be wild caught Atlantic salmon, which you never get in the US.



We ended up at the Skyline Bar 20up on the 20th floor of another hotel.  We were early (9:30), so the crowd was an interesting mix of near-teens and over 50s; we fit right in.  The views of the harbor were gorgeous, even with the serious cloud cover.  The shipping docks are automated enough that they operate all night, so there was a lot of activity. Our friend sent us home on the U-bahn so that she could party the rest of the night (ah, youth).

A nice breakfast at our hotel, a train ride home (of course, the sun came out as we headed for the train station), and a simple dinner at home to end the weekend.