Marzipan, Turkish Food and Starbucks (Lübeck and Hamburg)

Hello again! This time from Lisbon. It's wonderful to be back, but before I go raving about Lisbon, I'll write about how I got here.

The morning of my departure to Germany I took the train to Copenhagen and bought a Eurail pass, which gives me 10 days of rail travel in the span of two months. Pretty awesome, though we'll see later that it does have setbacks. Anyway, from Copenhagen I boarded a train bound for Lübeck. That was very entertaining, because the train went on a ferry to get to Germany! We were on the ferry for about 45 minutes and could get off the train and hang out on the boat. I arrived in the afternoon in Lübeck, Germany, which is a beautiful town. It's full of beautiful, 500-or-more-year-old churches and houses and, of course, Germans. It was pretty exciting to get to use a bit of my German (I checked into the hostel all in German!) but also tiring since I really don't know much German.

While in Lübeck I did what I do best: wander. That has become my #1 way of visiting places and I really enjoy it. I had dinner at "Tony's Pizza"--very German, right? I actually ate a lot of non-german food while in Germany (especially turkish, there's turkish food all over the place). The next day I saw two churches, two museums, and Lübeck's famous Holstentor gate. It rained, unfortunately, so I went into a cafe and read some H.P. Lovecraft that I had downloaded to my iPod (very handy when one doesn't want to bring books on trips!). I also ate some of the marzipan that Lübeck is famous for.

The next morning I hopped on a train to Hamburg (all these trains were paid for with my rail pass). I got to Hamburg with no map or idea of the city, so I procured a map at the tourist office and wandered around looking for a dry place to read it, because it was raining again. The public library was right next to the train station which I thought was fantastically lucky, until I discovered it was closed. I wandered around the library building, which contained other offices, hoping to find a dry space with a table and chair. This is where I looked super sketchy, by hopping into an elevator with someone going up to an office, randomly pressing the button for floor 3, and discovering that floor three was barren except for blocks of cement and construction materials.

So, lugging my suitcase, I left the library building and walked into the center of Hamburg, where I found a place with dry tables and chairs--Starbucks (oh, how American of me!). At Starbucks, I ran into a classmate from college! Such a coincidence. We sat and chatted a while, and she helped me figure out my Hamburg map. I ended up finding a decent hostel and then commenced my wandering again. I climbed a huge church tower (St. Michael's) and saw the crypt of the church, which had an odd exhibit about copper. Walking towards the center of Hamburg, I came upon the ruins of St. Nikolas church, which is now a war memorial and has a beautiful gothic tower. I ended up walking the whole day, who knows how many miles, all over Hamburg. I found a neighborhood full of portuguese restaurants and was relieved to be able to speak a language that I know better than German! I had a lovely Portuguese dinner, then walked around Hamburg until around 10:00, when, of course, it was still light out.

The next day was spent mostly on trains--it took 5 to get from Hamburg to Utrecht. But... at the moment I'm quite sleepy and it is almost 1 AM, so I think I'll write about the rest of Germany and the Netherlands later. Thanks for reading!