The Port City - Hamburg, Sep. 28

Sorry I haven't posted in the last couple days! Sunday was pretty laid back, and I spent most of Monday travelling, but I'm making this post now! Here's all that's happened since my last post.

Not much happened on Sunday, though I did grab a curry from a fast food Indian place, which was pretty decent. My main complaint is that my hostel wasn't very close to many food places, so I had to hop on the public transit just for a meal. I was getting pretty fed up with that hostel to be honest, it certainly wasn't the nicest place to stay for 3 days.

Monday was my travel day up to Hamburg. Because it's a relatively long trip from Munich, I was initially thinking about taking a night train to at least experience it once. But there were a couple issues that made me decide against it. I would've had to check out of my hostel in the morning and get to the station in the late evening, meaning I'd have no where to stay for the entire day if I wanted to just relax for a while. Even once I'd gotten to Hamburg in the early morning, I'd have several hours to kill before I could check in. And I probably wouldn't have gotten good sleep on a train, so I just decided to take a train over the day.

My train was another one of the fast ICE trains, but we never really got going super fast. A lot of the track seemed to go through either residential areas or windy places that limited how fast we could go. The total distance was a bit over 600km and took just over 6 hours, so we only averaged about 100kph. Regardless, it was still a fairly pleasant journey, as train rides go.

There was one annoyance that occurred though. The train didn't require seat reservations, so I just picked a random window seat, and someone else sat next to me. About 2/3 of the way to Hamburg, someone got on the train who had apparently reserved the seat I chose. And I couldn't see any indication whether any seats had been reserved, unlike other trains that actually had indicators. That would have been nice to know about! Especially since the train was rather full at this point, so there were only a couple seats open here and there. The guy I happened to sit next to wasn't the best neighbor, he kept leaning uncomfortably close to me. Oh well, better that on a train than a plane!

I got to Hamburg in the late afternoon and checked into my hostel. This place is actually fairly similar to the space hostel I stayed at in Berlin, except without the space theme. It's called CAB20 (not sure where the 20 comes from), where each floor of the building has several small cabs with beds in them, plus some useful trinkets. They're made with a very modern wood style, and they're actually pretty cozy.

Again, it's a lot like the capsules from the Berlin space hostel, but this is actually implemented a lot better in my opinion. There's actually a couple mains outlets in the cabs, so I can easily charge my laptop. There's a cool air vent that pushes a lot more air through than the space capsules, so it's much more effective at cooling the cab. And the shelf on the side has a wireless charging pad, so I can charge my phone without plugging in a cable. I've never had a wireless charger before, it's neat!

There's a few coat hangers if you need them, and a mirror above the bed. There is a window that looks into the hallway, but I've just had the blinds closed the entire time (plus everyone else too, the windows a bit weird). There are 2 light switches in the cab, both my the door and next to the bed. There's even a motion activated light under the foot of the bed. The WiFi here is also pretty decent, much better than the hostel in Munich where my typical upload speed was around 100kbps (if you're not aware, that's horrendously slow, only a bit better than dial-up).

Each side even has a speaker that you can connect to over Bluetooth, so you get your own stereo audio system! They seem to have tuned back the bass so it doesn't carry into the other cabs, clever. These cabs do a good job at preventing sound from getting in or out, much better than the space capsules. They also give you a wrist band with an RFID tag for unlocking your cab and accessing other secure areas. You can even use it to pay for food and drinks at the bar, which just gets added to your bill when you checkout. I've quite enjoyed it here, this is probably one of my favorite places so far!

I've also been exploring around Hamburg, the center of the city is fairly well pedestrianized. There's a variety of old buildings with tall spires that reach into the sky, which help with navigating if you can spot them. And of course, there are lots of water features all around. Hamburg is a big port city, so there's lots of waterways everywhere and bridges galore. Apparently Hamburg has the most number of bridges of all European cities!

I discovered the University of Hamburg is near the city center, and had an explore today. It's an okay campus, it's not spread out everywhere like the Munich schools. There were even some students actually roaming around, which helped me get an idea of what buildings are actually used. There are certainly some nice areas of the campus with trees and whatnot around, but there's a major road running through that kind of ruins it for me.

I found a campus map that showed some other buildings a few blocks away, which I initially thought were the physics buildings, but they seem to be more like administration buildings or something. I'm not certain, I didn't really look too close. Those buildings were also right next to a prison, which didn't make me feel super comfortable.

As I was walking around this area, I discovered a beautiful large park right next to the campus. I've noticed many of these parks have Garten in the name, but this is the first one I've found that really feels more like a garden. Everywhere I went was clearly put together by people, with all the plants and water features that made it feel very lively. This was a really nice place to walk through!

At one point, I turned around and realized the Heinrich Hertz Radio Tower was right there! It was actually a bit startling, because I hadn't even realized it was there since I'd arrived! This structure is enormous, pretty cool to see!

Later in the evening, I met with one of my dad's coworkers who lives in Hamburg. We decided to head to the river, which was a bit too far to walk, so we took bikes there instead. That was my first time riding a bike in Germany! Definitely glad I was able to do that at least once while I'm here, and I wouldn't have done it without someone else. It was definitely interesting to experience some of the bike infrastructure firsthand, and I've got some thoughts to share!

Bike lanes on the sidewalks are great. It keeps you away from cars, so there's basically no risk of getting hit by a car. It's even better when there's a line of parked cars (or other physical barrier) between the bikes and cars, it feels very safe.

Bike lanes on the roads are not so great. They exist in the US and I've used them before, they're not fun. They are a bit better here, they're wider and cars aren't zooming by at twice your speed, but they're still uncomfortable to use. Bicycle gutters, no thank you.

No bike lanes means you have to ride on the road. Like many other countries, riding bikes on the sidewalk isn't allowed (in most cases, there are some exceptions in Germany). Although the areas we came across without bike lanes tended to have very little traffic, so there wasn't really a need for dedicated bike lanes. So in a way, it was actually better than the painted bicycle gutters.

Left turns are interesting! In the US, you would have to make your way all the way over to the left turn lane before the intersection, and turn left like a car would. Not pleasant, since you're among lots of cars. However here, you stay on the right side of the road and go straight through to the corner. Then you point left and wait for your turn to go across again. This is a much safer way of doing it, even if it takes a bit longer sometimes. Some of these areas even have little bays for bikes to pull into while waiting to cross. I didn't take a picture and couldn't find a German one online, so here's an example from somewhere else. I think for medium to high density bike traffic, it would make a bit more sense for the bikes going straight to be on the right. But for low density bike traffic, this works better since bikes turning left can get better pointed to the left. These are neat!

We got to the river and had a couple drinks at a bar, which had a sandy floor with beach chairs. I didn't get a picture of that area, but it was a nice place to hang out. I did grab a picture just after sunset, showing off the port activity on the other side.

And now that's everything caught up! There are a couple other things that I wanted to mention, so I'll tag those on at the end here:

When I was in Munich, I learned that Germany has a very cool bottle recycling program. If you've got a bottle with a certain recycle logo on it, you can return it to any shop and they'll give you 15 cents for it. That's not a lot, so it doesn't really make it worth returning individual bottles. But if you've got a lot of bottles, that can add up quickly! It turns out that many people will leave their empty bottles on top of trash cans for homeless people to collect them, who then return them to stores to get a chunk of change in return.

I think that's a really clever system! It's a win for everyone involved, there's less plastic being wasted, you don't have to spend your time returning bottles, and homeless people have a source of income from it. I'm guessing there's some government subsidies involved with that, but I think it's a very smart solution to just return bottles for a few coins.

Speaking of coins, why are Germans so insistent on using physical money!? I hate dealing with exact change all the time! So many places don't accept cards, it's a bit ridiculous in my opinion. It would be fine with me if everything was round numbers, but there's so many times that prices are obscure values. I've ended up with collections of coins with tiny values that almost aren't even worth keeping. For anyone earning even minimum wage, it is literally not worth their time to fiddle around for a few seconds trying to get their pennies out. Cards have apparently become a bit more common since the pandemic started so people can pay without contact, but many places I've gone to still require physical money.

That picture is what I'd racked up over time. That's 4.02 euros in 14 coins. If something costs me 3.5 euros, you bet I'm gonna be spending the next 30 seconds fumbling around with all the loose coins in my pocket as I try to figure out which coins I need. I would honestly prefer to just hand over a 5 euro note and get more coins than spend time figuring that out. At least taxes are included in the sticker price, so you don't have to wait until you're told the exact amount. But still, just switch to credit cards, please!

Anyways, that's all for now! I'm not yet certain where I'm heading tomorrow, probably Hannover. I've got plenty of flexibility to change plans if I want, so I could even wait until tomorrow morning to decide. I've got a couple days before I head to the Netherlands on Friday, so that's my only constraint. We'll see where I go!