Life in Hamburg

Hi all.

We made it!  After uneventful flights, we landed in Hamburg early Friday morning and headed to our abode for the next three months.  We are in the Eppendorf quarter of Hamburg, in a third-floor walk up on a quiet residential street.  I expect to have much stronger legs by the time we leave!  Our landlord, Bernie seems like a really nice guy and had lots of area info for us.  We‘ve already been out exploring and found a nice cafe nearby for either breakfast or lunch if we want to eat out.

Since this is our first visit to Hamburg we went on the hop-on, hop-off bus tour to orient ourselves in the city.  The city center is primarily south of where we are staying but our school is just across the harbor from the Elbephilharmonic and near the downtown shopping and business areas.  The harbor area was much larger than expected and it was fun to see the headquarters for the shipping company cargo that we see come into the Port of Savannah.

Here are a couple of today‘s highlights:

The Tanzen Building (dancing building) is located on the edge of the Reaperbahn (red light district) near the harbor.  From a distance the curves appear to dance.  There is a restaurant on top of the left tower but since Paul doesn‘t do heights we will skip that one.

The Lemon Lady statue near St. Michaels church - local legend says that if you rub her finger, it will bring you good luck.  Of course the finger is rubbed down to the brass.

We start school on Monday and may be the only students in the class.  We got an email last night saying that the minimum number of students is four but that they had decided to go ahead with us with perhaps shorter hours.  We will discuss it with them, but private classes aren‘t such a bad thing.  In the meantime, I‘ve been trying out my really bad German in shops and at the grocery.  Two trips to the grocery and still no pretzels purchased!

We plan to spend the remainder of the weekend exploring the area around the apartment and may hop on the S-Bahn and head north to see what‘s going on up there.  Then back to school on Monday morning!