Today was a wonderful Hamburg day–it had cooled down significantly (with a high around 72 F (21 C) so we all felt like going out and exploring. Mark and I took a little walk early on into a nearby park and botanical garden. Then we all had breakfast and set out to explore Altona/Ottensen, a neighborhood of Hamburg just West of the harbor where Andrea and Peter lived when they first moved to Hamburg over 30 years ago (and if they had their druthers, they would still live there, although the formerly mostly working-class area has been massively gentrified). We started out by visiting the former “Gewerbehof” (a common series of connected buildings that combined industrial workshops (like machine repair shops and saw mills, not fancy stuff) and modest apartments, to which galleries, bars, and small businesses were added overtime. They showed us the window of the single room they rented for a year or so (kitchen and bathroom access only upstairs at the landlady’s), and tried to describe what the workshops used to look like. It was a trip down memory lane that was more sad than happy, partly because they know the entire Hof has been purchased by a developer and will be turned into upscale vacation rentals. We then saw several more of those “Werkhöfe” and transformed factories, in various stages of gentrification or decay, and also the most famous of all of these transformed spaces, the “Fabrik” (= the factory) which was already a punk-ish dance hall / bar / concert venue when I was in my late teens (I went once with my cousin Martin!).
Then we sat in a lovely pedestrian area and had cake and coffee in the shade, enjoying the cool of the day, before we made our way past a series of small parks to the so-called “Altona Balcony” where you can see the harbor and the river Elbe from high up.
Eventually, we made our way down to the Altona harbor area, where there are design studios and an enormous market hall where the famous Hamburg fish market is held every Sunday morning, and caught a boat (part of the public transport system!) back from there to the main harbor. We headed home around 4 pm to have salad and pita bread and rest up for a bit, because we wanted to go back out for the “First Thursday” where several of the major museums in Hamburg are free to enter. We first went to the Deichtorhallen, a venue for contemporary art, where a painter named Katharina Grosse had a major exhibit of a gigantic colorful painting that filled two sides of the enormous former market hall that is now the museum, plus a partially sculptural piece that filled an entire second room. The place was very busy and it was great to see so many people, including families with kids, coming out to see the installation. But at the second museum, the Kunsthalle, that turned out to be a little much–a new exhibition on Surrealism v. Romanticism attracted so many visitors on the free museum night that all four of us were completely overwhelmed. Even though it was clear that the exhibition is fantastic and a once-in-a-lifetime combination of world-famous paintings (think: Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea and Fog and paintings by Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Paul Klee, and Giorgio di Chirico) we decided to leave because it was packed. Andrea and Peter will come back some other time and pay to see it! Instead, we had some ice cream in the nearby shopping area and then made our way home. It was a full day but we were all so happy to explore together.
