Hamburg - First Impressions

Before coming to Hamburg I knew very little about the city other than the Beatles played here in their early days, it has red light district and a port.  I had imagined it to be a very industrial city and not very pretty.  I wasn’t wrong as my initial impressions were that it was a very industrial city and not at all pretty.  However, the day had only just begun so first up was a trip on a tourist boat which we thought would be a good way to see all the city highlights from the waterfront and I expected the normal relaxing touristy style voyage around the key tourist attractions that would give us an idea of the places we could later visit at leisure.  Wrong again, our little boat was jam packed when we boarded and although I was initially deterred by how much it was rocking, I knew from experience that the voyage usually gets smoother once further out into the deeper waters.  Not so in this case as even alter twenty minutes into the journey we were still bobbing up and down a bit too much for my liking.  Also I was yet to see any touristy sites as we seemed to be on a boat trip around all the industrial shipping docks so we saw a lot of cranes, shipping containers and enormous container ships.   In addition, once the commentary started in German we realised that we had forgotten to check it there was an English commentary as well – there wasn’t!  After a while I got used to the bobbing around and once we had left the container ship tour, I was more impressed with the combination of modern and old architecture of the buildings that lined the port and warehouse area – it bore resemblances to Canary Wharf in London.

Stepping off the boat 1.5 hours later in the searing mid-day temperatures of 32 degrees, it was time for a brief lunch stop.  The raw fish roll that John chose for us was a bit of a surprise but when in Hamburg as they say!

Feeling refreshed, the next tourist treat was the hop on, hop off bus.  After our German only commentary on the boat, we checked out if there was an English version on the bus and were assured that the newly fitted GPS linked recorded system, accessible via headphones was excellent for English speakers.  It did indeed work but we quickly realised that the commentary was not quite synced with what we were seeing and that it generally told us what we should be looking at once we were way past it.  We particularly noticed that the English commentary went totally silent all the way down the stretch of the Reeperbahn , i.e. the red light district whilst the German “live” commentary was particularly animated at this point.  We were fortunate to be travelling with 2 fluent German speaking friends who doubled up as our helpful translators during this trip. 

In need of a break we stumbled upon an excellent roof top bar overlooking the harbour and sitting amongst a number of British Stag parties, we sipped our beers overlooking the River Elbe and taking in the interesting views of the warehouse district.

Setting off later for an evening promenade along the waterfront, I realised that Hamburg was growing on me and certainly looked more charming at night particularly with the stunning bridges in all sorts of architectural designs.  Clearly many see this as a romantic city as numerous bridges had hundreds of little padlocks attached to them with the names of the couple inscribed on each padlock.  Although as in the case of the Pont Des Arts in Paris, this is not exactly good for the infrastructure of the bridge, it did make the city seem a much more pleasant place to be and less industrial. 

Certainly after one day in Hamburg its charm was growing on us and as the sun set the party goers were coming out to enjoy the bars, restaurants and party boats that Hamburg has to offer and we began to appreciate that Hamburg has a fun side to it too.