Two weeks ago a friend of mine asked if I wouldn't want to go to Hamburg for a few days. I thought, 'Hamburg? What's in Hamburg?' I didn't know anything about Hamburg, so I said, 'Why not?' It was then that I found out that Hamburg is almost the northest of north Germany, a port town on the river Elbe that runs to the North Sea. Brrrrrrrrrrr! But hey, I had never done any winter tourism other than skiing. So I was curious. So, I spent a week dashing from one building to the next in search of heat. Even with fully three layers of warm clothing, it was best to walk fast. Standing still would quickly have resulted in hypothermia.

The other reason I agreed to go, beyond raw unbridled curiousity, was for the fish. Fish in Vienna is very expensive and has always been frozen at least once before it gets to you. Fresh fish from the North Sea!

Unfortunately that was too much to hope for. For, if a citizen of Hamburg gets a hold of a fresh fish, the first thing he does, after whacking it to death, probably with a claw hammer, is to cook it until it is nothing but a grimy paste encased in a greasy, floppy breadcrumb blanket. I don't know what happened to the cooks of Hamburg, either they were all tortured to death on the rack in the middle ages, or they got so used to cooking for sailors with most of their teeth knocked out, that it became a sort of regional cuisine. To top it all off, the price for this 'fish' is exactly what it would be in Vienna, namely, I had to take out a bank loan and a mortgage on my backpack in order to sustain myself.

I began to question how the everyday Hamburger goes about eating, until I discovered the bakeries. What Vienna does for pastries, Germany does for bakeries and thank goodness, Hamburg falls into this tradition as well. Not only are delicious soft pretzels available in many varieties, (although 'classic salt' will also rule in my heart) but they have things like the 'Bee Plate' (Bienenteller) that has nothing to do with bees, but is a vanilla creme pudding substance squashed between two flat pastries, and is absolutely delicious. One Bienenteller is large enough that even Laurenz, who, I am convinced, had an operation trading his stomach for a Clydesdale's, couldn't finish the whole thing. So we ended up surviving mostly on baked goods and coffee.

I had often heard of the 'Reeperbahn' before, here in Vienna they have a portable truck bordello called the Reeperbahn. (The name is pronounced 'Raperbawn', disturbingly enough for English speakers.) Remember the bookmobile? Same idea, with hookers. Anyway, this little to-go bordello is named after the region in Hamburg where all the sailors used to go to get their kicks. I say 'used to' because according to a Hamburger friend of mine, with the coming of container ships the sailors no longer come ashore, they just stay on the ship. (They must have Playstations). So all the little dives and cafes that used to serve the sailors, now serve the tourists-- I guess that goes for the bordellos too. The whole area is much like other red light districts, dingy and depressing. Personally, if I was a john, I would rather pay a St. Pauli girl _not_ to sleep with me, from the look of things it would be the healthy choice. My friend was all interested to see the 'zugesperrte Strasse'-- a closed street where the shops are lined with picture windows in which prostitutes brandish their wares. When we arrived we found a red metal gate on which a sign read, NO youths under 18 and NO women admitted. I take it they meant women who weren't actually working there. Something about this prohibition struck me as being probably illegal, but I find it hard to imagine women getting together and petitioning for the right to hang out on that creepy street. I was glad to get out of there, myself.

A much more beautiful part of Hamburg is not far from there, all along the harbor are canals walled with tall, thin brick warehouses lined up in long rows. They have that old, proud craftsmanship of masons gone by and green copper roofs (which contrast well with the grey sky.) Some have been converted to modern apartments and offices, but many still stand as they were built. The harbor itself is large and complicated, it being built along the river Elbe with its many islands and tributaries. The sea is still quite a long ways off. We took a ferry tour of the harbor and watched with fascination the huge cranes raising and lowering their heavy burdens. One of the best things were these little trucks (little compared with the boxcar cranes, but actually huge) They are built to transport boxcars back and forth to where the cranes can load them into ships. They look exactly like a four-legged creature, with the driver perched way up top at the head. More than one of us got the urge to work at the docks, watching them drive around. I saw a name I recognized on some boxcars: Cosco. Cosco? Cosco. We stopped at an island town called Finkenwerder and discovered it was, except for the name, very boring. By the time we got the ferry back it was cold and a fine mist had come down, threatening to snow. Fortunately the ferries are heated with blast furnaces so the ride back was quite comfortable.

The last thing of note on the trip was that I saw snow at the beach. We schlepped the three hours out to the isle of Sylt, in summer a tourist paradise and in winter, a slushy tourist paradise. Even though it was butt-numbingly cold, there were more people ambling around on the beach than you could shake a stick at. The beach had large dunes haired with a black dune grass (I thought at first it had been burnt) and tons of shells and even real waves-- it was a proper beach. And then snow! In the mist of evening, as we were making our way back to the town, the colors of snowy dune, pink sand, blue-gray sea and white sky blended to form a striped, dreaming landscape. I would have enjoyed it, if only I wasn't ready to kill for a cup of hot coffee. Next time someone asks me to go north for the winter, I won't ask 'why not?'-- I know already.