Hamburg

I met up with stephanie in Hamburg, Germany. We didn’t originally plan to include Germany on our trip, but since I was already in Germany for work, and there were a couple places neither of us had been, we decided to include it. I also convinced Daniel, my client, to meet us there with his wife as well.

After settling in, we met for dinner near the harbor. Hamburg is cut by the Elbe river and is a big international port, so the seafood is fresh. Everybody was exhausted, so dinner and a stroll along the river was just about all anybody could manage.

The next day we slept in and met for a long and relaxing breakfast of meats and cheeses and coffees. After breakfast, Daniel and his wife Anja took us to part of town just outside of the city but still along the river called Blankenese. The edge if the river is flat and beach-like with a steep hill where old but very expensive houses are located. We walked along pretending to be rich locals for a couple hours watching the giant tankers float by.

Then it was off to city center where it’s your typical European metropolis with endless pedestrian roads of shopping and restaurants, but with a river and quays to relax at.

It was a short getaway for Daniel and Anja, so we said goodbye. But I’m fairly certain it will only be another 6 months before I see them again. There was serious talk about them visiting oklahoma in November when I will be excited to show them around Oklahoma City.

The next day we went to a nice art museum, took a ferry around the harbor, and visited a unique attraction called Miniatur Wunderland. If you can imagine a very fancy train set with an elaborate surrounding environment, and then imagine many of them that cover 2 floors of a building, then you can imagine this place. It’s pretty impressive. They even hide little things like a family of penguins waiting for a train or a random dinosaur. There’s also buttons everywhere that will activate something on the model. One of the buttons activates the chocolate factory and the machine actually spits out a piece of chocolate. The most impressive model to me was the fully functional airport. They built a terminal where model planes that take off, land, and taxi to the terminal. They even have a arrivals/departures screen that shows which ones take off and when. It’s really cool to see how coordinated they have to be to pull off something like that.