Hamburg - Day 1

We have a first hand experience of how a 24-hour daylight day would screw up your head.  We left Toronto at 9pm and arrived 5 hours later at 6am local time in Reykjavik, Iceland.  All through that flight, I was looking at the dusk colour of orange above the horizon out the window of the plane.  There was no urge to sleep because it was actually getting a little brighter all the time. We finally arrived in Hamburg 1pm local time with continuous daylight from Friday morning and eventually to Saturday evening. We nodded off repeatedly in our second leg of our flight from Reykjavik to Hamburg only because we had not slept the entire night.

We were gathering people from Toronto and Hong Kong in Hamburg and it did take a while but things went smoothly given the slight difference in the arrival time. We did not wait for two more from Hong Kong via Heathrow who would have arrived three hours later than us.  Unfortunately, they got caught in the middle of the British Airways computer problem that affect every BA flight Saturday and got stuck in Heathrow.  They have made arrangement now and hopefully they can make the sail with half a day to spare.  Keeping our fingers crossed.

We walked over to the Rindermarkthalle across the road after we arrived at the hotel.  That is a fairly big market building with many places to eat and three different supermarkets, each with slightly different kinds of merchandises.   After two legs of flights spanning about 10 hours without any in-flight meal, we are all ready to try some German foods.  We had curry bratwursts which are quite good.  Gigi had a generous portion of pork in a bun with sauerkraut for 3 Euro.  A good deal.   For some reason, our group members are the happiest with we visit markets and restaurants, anything to do with foodstuffs.

After a short rest, we set out again and walked to Reeperbahn.  The so called red light district is generally quite tame. There are more bars than anything to the east side of the area and more serious business to the west, maybe older side.  We walked through Reeperbahn down to the riverside. Today is also the day with a few cup finals around Europe so we were walking past quite a few groups of football fans along the way having a drinking good time.  Some of them are loud but still too early for things to get out of hand.

We were going to have a walking tour Sunday morning after the Fischmarkt but the rest of the group will be doing hop-on hop-off bus boat tours on Sunday.  We walked along the riverside and found a booth with tours and worked out a deal.  The tour operator then introduced us to the entrance of the Elbe Tunnel.  We have all read about the tunnel but have not figured out how to get there. That came as a welcome surprise. A walk across the river gave us fantastic views of the Hamburg skyline.  That was the last bit of adventure on a very long and tiring Friday-Saturday combo.