Euroadventure Stop 2: Hamburg

This guy had fashioned a dijireedoo out of PVC. he was good at it, too!

 Hey all

Those of you who saw Alyssa's FB update when we got in have seen the abbreviated version of this story but I hope to shed a tad more light on it. The short version is we got lost.
When we arrived at the Brussels train station we had a nervous time figuring out how to use our fancy rail passes. Essentially they gave us unlimited rail travel (and buses and ferries) on most European carriers without reservations. Our next planned stop was a quaint little walled Medieval town in southern Germany called Rothenburg ob der Tauber. It's on the Romantic Road and it was on the way to Italy so it made a lot of sense. We went to the bookings desk in belgium to ask how to get there (there aren't exactly any direct Brussels-Rothenburg rail lines) and the guy printed off an itinerary which we followed unquestioningly. I remember thinking it was weird that the itinerary didn't bring us through the places I expected like Wurzburg or Frankfurt. And I thought it was weird that one of our connecting trains (4 or so in total) was en route to Berlin though we got off long before that. It wasn't until we were sitting on a small commuter rail train from Hannover to Hamburg that I found the map and realized that the guy in belgium had printed us an itinerary to get us to Rotenburg, not Rothenburg. For the lack of an "h", we were now in northern, not southern Germany. We entertained the notion of going to Berlin instead but that would have stretched the next leg to Rome a lot so we stopped at the next reasonable-sized train station: Hamburg. Frustrated with both trains and Germany by now, we booked a sleeper train to Zurich and a connection from Zurich to Rome before popping out and killing a few hours exploring urban, modern Hamburg

This was by far the fanciest Starbucks I've ever seen.

These guys were playing Handel's Messiah on brass instruments. And not just the Hallelujah chorus. I wanted to wait and listen but it kinda started drizzling a bit.

The Rathaus, Hamburg's old Parliament building. Lots of people don't know that Germany is a very young country; younger even than Canada. Before that, most of the larger cities were the capitols of their own respective little principalities. Although, i think Hamburg might have been part of the biggest one: Prussia.

A shopping mall. We needed somewhere to chill. It wasn't exactly warm outside.

We saw these shops everywhere! They're jewelers, which I'm convinced is a metaphor for something though i can't quite figure out what yet.

 After strolling round Hamburg carrying all our stuff on our backs we were beat. We returned to the train station and had some food (I had authentic schnitzel and weissbeer, Alyssa had soup) and then counted the minutes until our train was ready to leave.
Sleeper trains in Europe come in a couple different varieties. Some are just chairs that recline. Some are elegant compartments with beds, like in Murder on the Oriental Express. This was the middle option: couchettes. They're little bunk beds, 6 to a compartment, and we got assigned the top two. You'd think you'd get motion sick sleeping in a train car but after a while the motion was kinda soothing. Any discomfort we might have suffered was totally made up for by the isn't-this-cool factor.