We were all up by 7, and Uschi and I went to get fresh rolls and some sweet baked goods for breakfast from the nearby bakery. After a sumptuous, delicious breakfast we went for a walk, this time all of us and with Uschi for a guide. We partly retraced our steps, got to see a little bit of the former archducal palace from the inside (the weather was too nice to spend more time touring it, although that would also have been interesting). We also stepped inside one of the few downtown buildings that predates 1675, when a fire burned down most of the old town. It is a shoe store now, but it has a very old ceiling painting representing the four continents (before Australia was discovered by westerners), in fairly bizarre ways. Apparently, America has camels?
The last part of our walk was through the neighborhood called the Dobben, after a former wetland that was drained in the 1870s, and built up with many large 2-3 story homes, some outright villas, for the growing upper middle class of Oldenburg of the time. They have a pretty distinctive style: their gables face the street and the main door is on the side, they are usually painting in shining white, and often have large glass-encased sun rooms, sometimes also bay windows and turrets—and they are lovely to look at. But nothing caught our photographer’s eyes! It was a nice little farewell walk, though. We then had a bite to eat and some coffee with Uschi and then took off around 12:30, heading back to the station and back to Hamburg.
We fixed some simple frozen pizzas and tomatoes with mozzarella for dinner, followed by ice cream with amarena cherries and chocolate for dessert, and then Mark and I got ourselves down by bus and subway to where Hamburg’s river Alster becomes a big lake, found the spot where the Wandse, a smaller river, flows into it, and walked back alongside it all the way to Andrea and Peter’s house, a little less than 5 miles. It was a lovely evening, there were lots of foliage, green space, and bodies of water (not to mention hikers, runners, bicyclists, and people walking their dogs); we had a really good time! We were back around 9:30 and fussed around with the blog photos for a bit before calling it a night.
