Now this was an experience, a one-of-a-kind, nowhere else in the world museum with lots of interesting samples! Ted had a hard time at first, because of the typical “men compare” issue, but he got over it soon….. (lots of tiny rodent samples!) It was a lot of fun, even at their restaurant!
It is the longest day of the year and you think that the sun has a lot of time to warm up this place here, but it’s the opposite: the sun doesn’t care much; it is checking in very rarely to see if we’re still there, but that’s pretty much it. It is cold. 6 degrees Celsius with stiff winds
The good thing about it: Nothing, really
On the chippy side: Bill and Yuki arrived yesterday and we had a great time catching up / getting to know each other. Bill & Ted were best friends from elementary school onwards, that provided lots of stories of broken bones and young guys hormone driven adventures. Lots of reminiscence and laughter! We had dinner at a Vietnamese noodle house and tasty cocktails at a bar: the winner was a cinnamon & orange gin & tonic! Tasted like Christmas – very appropriate for this kind of weather!
Bill and Yuki will join us at our next adventure: a cruise around Iceland, over to Norway, down to Scotland and England, ending in Southampton / London. I’m looking forward spending time with both of them!
No wonder they splurge with colors and graphics – drizzly, dreary, rainy day today. We explored a photo exhibition and a VERY unique museum. More about that in my next post…..
We have breakfast every day like anybody else. But we have breakfast in bed every day! And in order to have breakfast in bed, you need to buy food. That’s what we did yesterday, buying food for breakfast. Expensive food! We like bread and cheese, Müsli with yoghurt and fruit, tea and coffee. But when you look at the labels, you can see that Iceland hardly has any agriculture. Only 1% of the land is used to grow things and that mostly in greenhouses. They do grow kale, potatoes and cabbage, etc. But the blueberries and strawberries we had for breakfast came from the Netherlands and Spain, which is 5422 km away! If we’d eat local food, Ted would have to eat fish, which he is doing occasionally, but definitely not for breakfast. Btw, fish and aluminum products are the main export articles from Iceland. No surprise…..
When I woke up last night it was 3.30am. I went to the kitchen (the bedroom doesn’t have any windows) and was blended by the light outside. It was bright daylight! Brighter than most days in Monterey or any place along the Californian coast with all the fog and overcast!
But enough for now, we want to go explore the city and get to hear more of this interesting language, which is a Germanic language and developed from a few Norwegian dialects. It sounds like it has a lot of umlauts, ö,ü,ä and such. It also sounds as if people only use the front of their mouth, nothing coming out of the throat like some middle eastern languages. A friend of mine, a professor for phonetics, told me once that the mouth and tongue have ~ 60 different muscles and each language uses a different group of those. No language uses all of them. So that’s where my theory comes from: the islands people use only the front muscles to speak because if they’d open their mouth too wide when speaking they would have a sore throat all the time because it’s too cold. Or what do you think?
Everything has an end but the sausage has two…
Our time in Hamburg ended today, and since we liked it sooo much, Hamburg decided to neutralize our enthusiasm by making our departure extra bumpy: it took us 4 hours to go through security!
Hundreds of people were lined up around the terminal and many people missed their flights. We were extra early at the airport and only because we skipped the line and because of a medical emergency inside our airplane that took 1 hour we were just in time for departure. This was ridiculous!
Flying to Stockholm, Sweden was ok and we just barely made it to our connection to Reykjavik, Island.
Another hour on the bus and we were finally at our cute Airbnb!
But the actual reward was a pricey, but excellent dinner at Apotek, a place just around the corner from where we’re staying
Upon arrival Iceland greeted us with sunshine , the locals were out on the street, sitting in cafes and having picnics at the park. Visitors from California, especially female visitors, were dressed in long down coats and freezing! Afterall, it had only 10 degrees Celsius!!! 🥶
So far, we travelled 20 days in 5 countries. The time changed 9 hours ahead (California to Germany) and 2 hours back (to Iceland). Now it’s bright daylight, 9pm and my brain is tired and confused…..
To be honest, you’d need a month in Hamburg just to see the bare minimum! No wonder that our 5 days were way too short. So today we tried to squeeze in a few more highlight…..
Tomorrow is our last day in Hamburg…(part 3)!
We have really enjoyed having Ana and Jurgen (Edith’s youngest brother and his wife) who have joined us here in Hamburg!! We have been touring the city and playing the card game “rummy”… Edith and I have won more games than they have…(however, no one is counting)!! lol
Tomorrow (Sunday June 19th) we are getting up early to go visit the fisch (German for fish) market! Open from 6-9:30am. I am sure that it will be very stinky… however I will grin and bear it… for the fun of the experience! Hopefully, I won’t have to eat fisch for breakfast!! Just the thought makes me feel queezy!
Monday, we fly out to Reykjavik, Iceland for our 4th chapter of our adventure! We have planned several excursions while in Reykjavik….however, rain is expected for our entire stay.
Then on the 21st (my 74th birthday also the year’s longest day) My friend, Bill Powell (my friend since 3rd grade) and his wife Yuki will arrive to Reykjavik and join us for our cruise with Norwegin Cruise lines… visiting northern Iceland, Norway and Great Britian (Southhampton).
From there we hoping to get to Ansterdam… we’ve have been considering a 2 day cruise, rail, air, ferry and bus…the only practical way to get to Ansterdam seems to be via air.
I (we) are looking forward to more adventures!! All is better than good!!!!
Hamburg has a lot of water, the Elbe, the Alster and the close proximity to the North Sea. Water is important to every bodies life and so we decided to do another boat tour: this time on the Alster. It was stunning, beautiful and surprising!
We also went to see the old City Hall, which was very impressive!
If you want to be a child again for one day, if you want to explore
10 theme worlds,
16,138 meters of railway tracks,
1,120 model trains,
over 10,450 waggons,
approximately 497,000 lights,
289,000 figures and
137,000 trees,
then you have to visit this “Wunderland”. I’ve been at a few railroad museums, miniworld kind of places. Some were cute, some were funny, some were informative / technical, but the Miniature Wonderland here in Hamburg is amazing! Ted loved the airport, Anja enjoyed Rome, Jürgen is already looking forward to their upcoming new addition: Monte Carlo and what I enjoyed the most? thunderstorms, lavender fields, archeological sites, etc. I just loved the details, the every day life scenarios. It was fantastic! Having a little treat with the 30min Virtual Reality tour as one of the figures in the miniature Wunderland was an extra bonus! My VR equipment didn’t work, unfortunately, but watching Anja, Jürgen and Ted moving like drugged zombies who are sleepwalking against a wall was very funny…..
….. it is even better, way better, if you can explore it with your brother & wife!
They flew up from Munich yesterday morning to spend our remaining days in Hamburg together. Our highlights of the day were a harbor cruise where we saw many incredible things: worlds biggest container ship, the biggest non- nuclear submarine, etc.
A few Hamburg facts at the end:
1. When it comes to the amount of bridges, Hamburg is on place 2 in the world. Guess who is number 1?
2. Each year 9 million containers are shipped out of Hamburg (Shanghai ships 43 million containers each year, but currently they are under total lockdown)
3. Docking one night at the harbor is very expensive. A big ship like the Queen Mary 2 for example, costs ~Euro 50,000 per night. (That’s why they usually come in very early in the morning and leave late in the afternoon)
4. between high and low tide the water level changes about 3.7 meters! That brings in a lot of sand and mud that needs to be cleared out all the time
5. The answer for #1 is New York! 🧐