Hamburg Initial Impressions

These blogs may be a bit out of order since I don't have continuous net access and as such am doing them offline, so bear with me if things are a bit disjointed.

I've just arrived in Hamburg, and this is the night and day, yin and yang, diametric of Munich. Munich was clean, orderly, regulated, with more or less of a bedroom community feel to it. Even the most crowded places, such as the Munich Hbf (the downtown train station) was well-mannered.

Hamburg, on the other extreme, is noisier, dirtier, and in the area near the Reeperbahn definitely sleazy. I've already seen three panhandlers, more than I saw in nearly the entire week I was in Munich. Sex shops abound, and the "roped off" area is still there, although pretty quiet at the moment given that it is 2:30 in the afternoon. I'll wait a few hours for things to liven up and take a look after dark.

Case in point: I just sat down in the hotel lobby to write down a few notes, and within five minutes three police officers arrive and start questioning some woman who is in the lobby. They're too far away, and my German is still too rusty to understand exactly what is going on, though I think the cop told the woman something to the effect of "You know you don't have to say anything..." BTW, the lady cop is definitely hot, brown and blond two-tone ponytail. Somehow, that just seems to fit this town: Woman in uniform, with a gun and handcuffs and a very sexy hairstyle. Yep, this definitely is not Munich.

The sex shops are open at this hour, as are the live shows, and I guess part of getting older is feeling more perturbed when the doormen try to hustle you in. If you've read more than a few of these blogs, you know by now that I am not offended by this sort of thing, but rather I'm just annoyed at getting hassled when I walk down a street since I'm not terribly inclined at this point in my life to pay money to go in and watch young women prance around naked on a stage.

In case I forget to mention it later, I'm staying in a place called the "Zleep Hotel," and it definitely is not as nice as the KK Munich Hotel. It's not bad, just spartan, albeit relatively cheap and right by the Grosse Freiheit, which is the party part of town. There's some sort of a weird speaker gizmo underneath the "bench" in my room, and I have absolutely no idea what it is for. Somehow, though, that sort of bizarre thing just fits in here perfectly; this should be an interesting area to stay in for the next couple of days.