Kylin's European Grand Adventure: Day 8

We are so surprised at how much we like Hamburg. We were expecting some rough maritime city and it is the most sophisticated city yet. Of course, we are staying in the heart of the premier shopping area so that skews our opinion.

Today we did another hop/on hop/off tour which was the first one with a live tour guide. That was nice most of the time. She would do German and then English. The German was much longer than the English and we got that -- their words are longer and she was more comfortable in the German. The city hall has 600+ rooms and 2 more than Buckingham Palace and was built on 4000 pilings. Saint Michaels Church was rebuilt in the 1960's and seats 2000. St. Nicholi's Church was destroyed in the war and never rebuilt. It is a memorial to war. Hamburg has more bridges than Amsterdam. The tax house is the only building that was completely untouched in the bombings. You can see all of these in the photos.

The tour guide was a tyrant -- yelling at people for standing up before the bus completely stopped, standing on the stairs when the bus was moving, at us because we thought the bus stopped at all the stops on the tour and some of them you had to let know ahead of time (was she kidding us?). We wanted to ask for our previous tip back!

We then ate lunch outside by Lake Alster while we waited for our next tour. OMS: this tour was only in German so we got a lot from that! However, the Lake is beautiful and the sun was wonderful so we enjoyed ourselves in spite of that.

From there, we were on a church hunt. On our way to the first spire we saw a tow truck pick up an illegally parked car. John took a short video of that which we will post on FB, not here. Then we went to St. Petri's Church which had a more modern interior than exterior. I bought a candle and lit in memory of Joanne, Susi's sister, and Julane, our neighbor. The next church was St. Jacobi's where someone was practicing the organ. The organ was one of Europe's finest baroque pipe organs with over 4000 pipes. John took a video if this which we will post on FB. They also had an exhibition of some marvelous wooden statues. It was a "touching" exhibit in that they encouraged one to touch them. Very interesting. We walked through the Europa Passage, a 4 story shopping mall, while on our walk to St. Michael's. We were actually trying to find St Katerini's but took a wrong turn. We stopped at St. Nicholi's along the way. There was a statue in the middle of the former sanctuary that was in memory of the concentration camp and some of the bricks were from that camp. St. Michael's is more modern and I thought it was a little cold. You can judge for yourselves from the photos. St. Petri's and St. Jacobi's had clean, simple lines rather than lots of ornate gold accents.

We walked a lot this afternoon so stopped at one of the many outside cafes for a glass of wine on the way back to the hotel. I asked for water and he brought me a shot glass of water. ? We laughed!

Tonight we ate at a restaurant down on one of the canals. It wasn't the greatest meal, but what it lacked for in flavor it made up in ambience.

Didn't meet any interesting people today -- maybe tomorrow as it's another train day (at least 6 hours).

What the well-dressed Hamburg female golfer is wearing