Hamburg

Sunday evening we went to the lab to prepare stuff. It's a huge building filled with exciting stainless steel equipment and tangles of wires. 

Look, it's some scientific equipment!  

We are shooting synchrotron radiation at some crystals to try and figure out what electrons are up to inside them. Or we would be if we hadn't found out the setup has a broken valve that means we can't start until tomorrow or the next day. Le sigh.

We glued the crystals to a bit of copper with silver paste so we can cool them down.

 I woke up brutally early and went into Hamburg. I bumbled my way through the bus and train system - with the kindness of strangers. Upon leaving the train station this was the first thing I saw:

Who doesn't?

I knew I was going to like Hamburg. Unfortunately I immediately stumbled across a little village of homeless men huddled in sleeping bags. Nothing like a bit of homelessness to get you down.

I walked to the Rathaus, which is the spectacular town hall. Since it was still way early in the morning, the huge square in front was pretty much deserted. When I went back later that afternoon it was buzzing. I think it was more majestic when it was empty though.

I found my way to St Nikolai. The whole of Hamburg was heavily damaged by firebombing at the end of the war. 35000 people died. While this is not comparable to, say, the 23 million Russians killed in the war, it's an annoying fact of life that two wrongs don't make a right. The wrecked church stands as a memorial to the atrocities of the war. It's beautiful and powerful.

There were lots of photos of the devastation in Hamburg, and they looked eerily like the centre of Christchurch after the quake. I thought about how the cathedral would be as a memorial of this kind, but since it's not so important we are all constantly reminded how lame earthquakes are in the same way as waging war, I don't think it would have the same gravity.

The Rathaus from the top of St Nikolai

Angel at St Nikolai

I don't think the Germans are actually that keen on hamburgers. It took me ages to find a place that sold them and it turned out to be a greasy trailer on the harbour promenade. However: chips with mayonnaise and a little fork! On my search I found loads of nice restaurants with cheap and delicious-looking lunches but I DON'T REGRET MY DECISION IT'S THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THING. 

The second in the series: "photos of disappointing fast food".

Despite the bombing, Hamburg still has loads of nice old buildings and I walked around all morning. There are also a lot of canals and tidal rivers. I found the artist's quarter, with sunny studios where happy and prosperous creative people painted and ate cake and made apps. Nice to see! Also lots of cool statues, but oddly most of them looked kind of unhappy.

"You don't ever think about my needs!"

Arrivals

Before I left on this trip, my officemate Ian told me about Zopiclone sleeping pills. Ian is a genius and thanks to him most of the flight from Singapore is unremembered. The parts I do remember were watching Rebel Without a Cause (brilliant!) and eating really disappointing airline food (less brilliant). My prof has asked for pictures of delicious meals I am consuming. Maybe he isn't aware I'm going to Germany? So far I have eaten the aforementioned airplane meals and this donner kebab:

It was okay, I guess.

There was an unspecified MEDICAL EMERGENCY at the start of the flight that meant we arrived in Frankfurt really late and had to RUN through the ENORMOUS airport (there were several times I thought "puff puff must be there ohgod" and turned a corner to be faced with another huge corridor of perfume and booze shops). Turned out when we collapsed wheezing against the Lufthansa ticket desk, we'd been rebooked on another flight an hour later and everything was fine and there had been no need or anything above a leisurely saunter.

I was thirsty from the running so I had my eyes on the refreshment trolley on the flight to Frankfurt. It started down the other end of the plane and I occupied myself by watching its slow approach and imaging how good drinking a cold glass of coke would be. When it got to the last two rows, the woman explained that since we were last minute additions to the flight, all the alloted refreshment had been used up and gave us each a dry biscuit. DESPAIR.

The bus to the hostel had a library! You could take and leave books. Too cool! I did not take or leave books because they were all in German.

The library on the bus, special little shelves and everything!

My first act upon entering my hostel room in Hamburg was to put my keys down in the room, step outside the room and watch the door swing shut. With the keys inside. My next move was to tell my travelmate Konstantin I would see if I could find someone to get a spare key and come back if I couldn't, and leave the hostel building. As I stood in the rain and watched the door shut I realised I needed the keys to get back in to the building as well.

Luckily this kind of thing has happened to me many many times before so I have honed my charmingly shamed smile for the security men. My room is a shape that makes it tricky to photograph, but if you imagine a desk, a bed, a wardrobe and some pristine and lonesome white walls that's it! It has a big window that overlooks an oak tree.

Singapore

Singapore airport is so big it's hard to tell how big it actually is. Travellators sweep off to beyond sight. To travel between terminals I had to take a Sky Train which reminded me of a really rubbish rollercoaster. The airport has a butterfly garden!! I foolishly decided to have a transit hotel experience (which is where you lie in a tiny partition of a room listening to businessmen snore for 3 hours) before I looked at the butterflies and was disappointed to discover that although the airport operates on weird airport time where it is always day, the butterflies go to sleep at 8pm.

On the plane over I sat next to a farming couple who were possibly having marital problems. The only thing he said to her was to point out a type of fence in a magazine about fencing. Maybe this is normal? I dunno I'm not married. He was like a character from a Barry Crump novel. He sat like a farmer, which meant digging his elbow into me and actually non-metaphorically twiddling his thumbs and flicking through the same magazines over and over again and ignoring the in-flight entertainment system. The sky was clear and we flew all the way across Australia. It's not quite desert... dried up blackened riverbeds, scrub, wells of sand and... roads? A surprising number of straight dirt line networks that must be man made but go nowhere. No houses. What are they for? Is it just a sign that humans have conquered even those inhospitable wastelands?