After the cycling adventures, I headed off to Hamburg while Yael headed down to Malta with Andy and his mom. In Hamburg I stayed with Karolin and Christian. Karolin's a friend from Australia who was there on exchange my first year there. We went on many excellent adventures there, and I've visited her in Europe before and gone on some excellent adventures with her there as well.
Karolin is just over 8 months pregnant at the moment, but still managed to get out and do a bit of sight seeing with me. We took a ferry around the harbour one day, so we could see the city without doing much walking. Hamburg is much greener than I expected! Many many parks, with rivers and canals all over the city. There's even a beach (although a man-made one, but looks quite nice). Check it out:
We also went to see "The Grand Budapest Hotel" in the evening. I find it awkward talking to German's about WWII, often, and it was interesting to see a movie with such heavy WWII ties in Germany. The theatre was actually in the Jewish quarter of Hamburg, and Chris was pointing out things for me. Like where the synagogue used to stand, there's now an open square with the outlines of the old synagogue foundations and walls tiled in a different colour stone. And also all the houses have small brass plates in front of them with the names of the people who'd lived in the houses and were taken off to concentration camps. Some houses had 5 or 6 plates in front of them. So it was interesting to see a film about the lead-up to WWII in a place where the events the movie was based on actually happened.
It has been 6 years since I'd last seen Karolin and Christian, and so 6 years since being in Europe, and it feels a very long time. Hopefully it won't be 6 years before I see them again.
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