A one stop shop!

“Everything in closed on Sunday, so you better stock up at the grocery store which closes in thirty minutes,” said the guy at the front desk of the grimy Hamburg Hostel. I booked us into a twin room, it was cheaper than the double, and we ended up with a bunk bed - not such a good deal after all. We relocated the mattresses to the floor only to find used tissues and a dust bunny the size of a tumble weed under the bed. We made sure to consume enough beer so we could forget the mess and get some shuteye.

We rose early, although not the most restful sleep, but the one thing that we were positive we could get up to on a Sunday was the Fischmarkt. At 6:30 am the front desk guy gave us detailed directions to our destination that included riding on a bus, a train, and a ferry when it didn't look that complicated on the map. Lucky for us, Sean checked the map since the bus only came every hour and we had just missed it and we made a much more direct route.

We thought the Fischmarkt might be like Granville Island Market in Vancouver or the Pike Place Market in Seattle, or maybe it would just be a couple of stalls, but it was so much more.

There were dozens upon dozens of fish auction halls, also known as stalls, spread out along the port, flower auctions at opposite ends with sellers yelling out prices and people bidding below, and fanciful fruit baskets for 8 Euro at every turn - and I just had to have one of those. I really just wanted the basket and the fruit was an added bonus, which happened to weigh 10 kilograms. The spectacle at the Fischmarkt attracted both the early morning risers (that was us) and the all night partiers desperate for a fish sandwich – some grease is often required to absorb alcohol, or at least this is what I believe whenever I eat pizza at 3:00 am.  And wouldn’t you know, at 8 in the morning, we followed the sound of a live band into a warehouse and joined in with the festivities of yesterday’s still ongoing party, at Oktoberfest.

Sundays in Europe are different then I am use to, one cannot go out to grocery shop or head to the mall to fill the time – but if you wander out of your cozy apartment (or a grimy hostel), you never know what you may stumble upon. Such as the Red Light District, which we can confirm is always open for business.

P.S. There was no way two of us were going to devour all the fruit before our trip was up – so that fruit came all the way back to Denmark with us.

Day Tripper

A cool aspect of living in Århus is that you can nip off on a four and a half hour train ride to the third largest port in the world (next to London and New York). Nine hours of trains for a weekend trip might sound rather intense, until you consider how long is a bus ride to Swartz Bay, a ferry across the channel, and a subsequent bus/train ride to downtown Vancouver. Here one might not see orcas nor eagles, but the rural Danish/German landscape has its own charming appeal.

Andrea and I both love visiting Germany. The cities are overwhelmingly large, and it seems that everything else is correspondingly large, as well.  For 1.89 euro, you can find Ritter Sport bars the size of a dinner plate.  Cups of ice cream come with three flavours and a mountain of whipped cream.
And there's always a spectacular Botaniske Have.
In Århus, we live beside the Botaniske Have, and it makes for a very pleasant twenty minute walk to make one's way around it's perimetre.  In Hamborg, we ventured through for about 90 minutes, from roses to cacti to olive trees, and still missed the majority of what was to see.  But we had little choice, if we were going to walk the hundreds of rooms of Picassos and Cezannes at the kunsthalle before it closed.

So, really, given the nature of these cities, it's good that we're only there for a weekend.  Even by the end of that, we're starting to feel a little "groß" (pronounced "gross") ourselves...

PS. Can you spot the difference between these two photos?

Nürnberg, Oct/2011

Hamborg, Oct/2013