My time in Hamburg was fleeting. I literally arrived off the overnight bus from Copenhagen, had a nap in the hotel lobby and then went on a walking tour. That is where I learned most of my shit in Hamburg. The rest of the shit I learned on a drunken night out with my new friends from in the dorm room…..

• The first law that was passed in the constitution for the City of Hamburg is that it is illegal to burn down the town hall. This was after the Vikings did it more times than one can count to get back at the town folk and establish their awesomeness.
• The organ in the crypt at St Jacobi’s church was played by Bach. During the second world war, the whole entire organ was disabled and put in the church basement to try and prevent damage to it. While the rest of the building was bombed to smitherines and everything else inside destroyed, the organ surprisingly survived under the ground and was eventually reconstructed.

• As we have discovered in our travels of Central America earlier, the same word for calling an inanimate object hot, ‘caliente’, when used to refer to oneself also means ‘horny’. This same issue also arises in German when a person uses the word for ‘cool’. It also means ‘horny’ in German…. I can’t remember what exactly that word is….
• I would rather walk outside of the door of a church where they are asking for money in their donation box, tell them no, and then hand the money to a homeless guy. The church is rich enough as it is.

• The great fire started in a cigar factory. Unfortunately, there was an alcohol store next door to this. Even more unfortunate was that the alcohol shop owner was stupid. In a panic that his shop would be destroyed, he started pouring out all of the alcohol out of his shop window into the river. The river that was barely running because there wasn’t a great deal of water in it. When the fire trucks arrived and started pumping water out of the river to wet down all of the adjacent buildings so that they wouldn’t catch fire as easy, the opposite effect was observed. The entire row of buildings went up in flames as they had just been doused in alcohol. Good times all round….
• The Beatles have a record shaped place called the Beatles Platz with artistic statues in the Reeperbahn. I learned later in the evening that the Reeperbahn is pretty much the ‘red light district’ of Hamburg. I had a very interesting night out here where I learned that DJ’s are incapable of finishing a song past the 1st chorus, that pizza is very awesome, and that hangovers are horrible on planes.

Not a great deal learned, but I guess it is quite a bit for the 24 hours that I was there. I definitely think I will be needing to spend some more time navigating German cities 🙂