The 09:00 ICE from Essen to Hamburg left at 09:30 but was equipped with a functioning dining car, so it was easy to excuse minor tardiness on a train that had already been travelling for about six hours by the time I got on.
The delay afforded a little time to look in shops and choose my first lovely tourist tat of the journey so far, so that was good. I meant to pick some up in Karlsruhe and Cologne but decided that the best way to control the number of magnets I need to carry is to only buy them from places I’ve been for more than a day.
This is a convenient absolution of my previous failures, and gives me a valid reason to return to places later on.
The dining car was not equipped with a functioning dishwasher so my French breakfast feast was served in a cardboard box and the coffee in a cardboard mug rather than on lovely DB china.
Nonetheless it was a dining car which had windows and everything and which set me up nicely for the journey which itself was quite uneventful, save for a test of the emergency alert system at 10:59 which slowly set everyone’s phone off.
Just as I was getting ready to start tutting at people who’d not set their phones to silent, mine went off.
Thankfully, there was no danger.
By the time we pulled into Hamburg fifty minutes late, I’d had my breakfast, watched some bits on YouTube, and sort of made a plan on what to do in Hamburg, which was limited to not doing very much really. The delay was fortuitous in allowing me to go straight to the hotel and check in without needing to find ways to kill the time, and then I ended teaching from a tiny table in a ‘cosy’ hotel room (with an equally cosy but lovely little balcony) right behind the station — such is my glamorous nomad lifestyle.
I took a little time in the evening to have a wander round and look at a few things to perhaps do later, but an evening appointment kept that short and by the time I’d nursed a gluhwein in the square in front of the Rathaus (still no rats) I wasn’t really in a mood for exploring more. This was probably a good thing, really, as at about 9pm there was a shooting at the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall just a few minutes’ walk away so wandering around the the area probably wouldn’t have been much fun anyway. By coincidence, I heard the sudden arrival of sirens en masse as I was contemplating whether to go out or not and wondered what had happened.
The bits of Hamburg I did get to see by night, especially near the water, were really rather pleasant.
My hotel was wonderfully kitsch and unexpectedly velour.
The woman on reception deserves a special mention for being simply fabulous and giving me a list of things to do and recommendations of where to eat. Miniatur Wunderland had been on my list but Hostess pointed out that ‘a couple of hours’ is not enough and that it needs to be seen by appointment anyway. meaning I’ll have to set aside the time to do it properly.
It snowed in the evening. I tried my new gloves and declared them a successful purchase.
