Mark and I woke up early, saw it was sunny AND that it was supposed to be raining later, and decided to just grab his tea and our backpacks with a backup snack and go exploring. (Andrea and Peter had some packing and travel prep to do.) So we took the subway down to Landungsbrücken, the main quay at Hamburg harbor, and started walking from there. It’s a wonderful, lively tourist spot (even at 7 am there were some runners and the first early birds, although it was not crowded); we’ve been there many times, but the nearby area where the former docks have become apartments and businesses changes so fast that it is always a new experience. Hafen City with many fancy new high rises and the famous new Hamburg Philharmonic building/money pit (the “Elfie” for Elbphilharmonie) contrasts with the late 19th century warehouse district, the Speicherstadt, which is now a UN World Heritage site. I still remember when the warehouses along the canals were derelict and most of the stores were oriental carpet import businesses, but now almost everything is gentrified, with the last few buildings being renovated for residences, restaurants, and offices. What I hadn’t really known until this visit (even though I’ve been here many times) is that an entire working-class district with cheap 18th-century housing, used by the families of the dockworkers and stevedores, was torn down to make way for the warehouses, and displaced some 18,000 people back in the 1880s. Peeling the layers of history back… always a risky business.
We watched containers being moved from a huge container ship to trucks by crane for a while–harbor activities are endlessly fascinating; I am not sure why!–and walked from the Hafen City apartment complexes across a little park and many bridges past the new subway station by the bridges that cross the river (the Elbe) half-way through the harbor, across the pedestrian lane of the bridge (where I found some delicious wild blackberries on bushes that were growing wild where a staircase to the bridge had been closed off) and into the older industrial section of the harbor, which was a major hub until the 1950s, but fell into partial disuse because it was unsuitable for the big cargo containers that became the norm in the 1960s. In recent years, a Hamburg nonprofit has made part of the area an indoor/outdoor harbor museum, where you can see the development of ships from sail to steam to electric motors, not to mention old harbor trains and cranes–fun stuff which appeals to visitors of all ages, so that we had to contend with elementary school kids, teenagers, and a large group of teachers.
When we had enough (and a snack), we took a bus to a boat terminal that is part of the public transportation system here, and took the boat back across to Landungsbrücken, with a little detour through part of the harbor that I had never seen, complete with what we thought was very probably a houseless person’s squat under a bridge, but one of the most unique squats we’ve ever seen!
Then we took the subway back home and Andrea and Peter fed us ice cream and cookies for a mid-afternoon snack. We spent the remainder of the afternoon at home, packing and dealing with things (the forecast rain eventually arrived around 4 pm), had a lovely pasta dinner at home, and sorted out the remainder of our travel logistics for tomorrow.