Another fairly low-key day, with low-key travel. We took off from my mom‘s about 9:30 to take a train to Hamburg (about 2 hours north), to visit our old friends Peter and Andrea, as we always try to do on our trips to Germany. They picked us up at the train station because they were already downtown, and we then took public transport to their apartment and had a lovely lunch of cold polenta with a sour-cream-based dip and salad. It was even hotter than it had been in Rome (and Osnabrück) and we were all ready to take a nap and stay indoors. Andrea and I talked about my project and looked at my photos from various art museums, and we discovered that we missed out on a fabulous (and super creepy) museum in Florence because I failed to follow up on a link she sent me. It was right next to the Pitti Palace, is called La Specola, and has many more anatomical wax models than the ones we saw at the Galileo Galilei Museums. Andrea, who is trying to teach herself how to make wax models herself and has considerable expertise, had several fantastic books about them. But I guess we had to miss out on something, and it gives us an excuse to go back… But it would have been an interesting museum not just because of the creepy but fascinating wax models, but especially because it was basically the first museum that had official opening hours for the public (separated in lower and higher classes), long before any of the art galleries became public museums with this kind of administration.
After a leisurely afternoon at home, we went out briefly because we had never shown Mark the Hamburg red-light district, and I myself hadn‘t been there in decades (and even then, maybe twice if that in the whole time I lived in Hamburg). But with it being very early (5 pm) and threatening to rain, there were basically no tourists and it was all pretty blah. Peter and Mark went through the notorious „walled-off“ street that is technically only for male visitors, Herbertstraße, which has prostitutes sitting in glass boxes as they do in Amsterdam, but in this separate cordoned-off street. But there was basically no one there, either. But we all knew we were not going to last until 11 pm when it would actually get dark and busy! So we just sat out the actual downpour (apparently the first in weeks here) at a little pub dedicated to Hans Albers, the 1920s actor who made the red-light district and the neighborhood (right near the harbor, unsurprisingly) famous, and then walked around a bit more through the mix of staid-looking older buildings and glitzy sex shops, commercial theaters (this is basically Hamburg‘s „Broadway“ as well) and seedy-looking bars. We were on our way back home around 7 (Andrea had recently broken her toe and just couldn‘t do that much walking) and we had bread and cold cuts at their apartments for our dinner, and then sat around and shot the breeze until we all decided that it was time to go to bed. It‘s been nice to slow down a bit.