July 16- Hamburg

After breakfast, we drove the rest of the way into Hamburg. Unlike most of the places we’ve been so far (with the exception of Munich), Hamburg is a large modern city. It has the huge buildings and busy expressways that any large American city has. It requires a bit of patience and planning to navigate. We found our way into the city center, and parked in a parking garage. We then found our way to the large Rathaus (City Hall), which we’ve learned is always a good place to start looking for information.

While following the signs to the information center, we also found places to do our tourist shopping. We bought the mandatory a pin for Scott’s hat and a patch for Julie’s jacket. (We also distracted Anastasia while we bought a scarf she liked to give to her for her birthday tomorrow.) A rather large film crew was filming a television show or a movie, and we were yelled at in German to get out of their way.

Eventually, we found the tourist information desk, tucked down in the underground shopping areas towards the subway tunnels. The man there gave us directions to the museum we wanted to visit, but didn’t ask if we were driving or walking. He assumed we’d want to take the subway to the docks and then catch a ferry across the Elbe River to the museum. Ultimately, we would have been better off if we had driven to the museum and parked there, but we felt like we were up to the adventure of traveling in these different modes of transport.

We did all right on the subway. Julie figured out how to by our tickets from the machines, since all the ticket sales are automated. We read the signs and maps and got to the right train. We only had to go two stops, where we got off. This portion of the docks is filled with tour boats, restaurants and shops. We were told by a person working there that we wanted “Dock 10.” We found our way to dock 10 and bought our tickets. Then we went to get lunch, because it was after 11:30.

We wanted to get hamburgers, because we were in Hamburg, after all. But the restaurants along the dock all specialize in seafood. We found the word “Hamburger” in three different items on the first menu we looked at, but none of them seemed to have anything to do with beef. One was a soup (perhaps with shrimp) and one was an ice-cream dish. We went to a surf and turf place further on, but still didn’t find hamburgers. We found salads for Julie and Anna, chicken “nuts” for Emma, and got Scott a steak and potato. We never added up the total of what we were eating, but when the check came it seemed awfully high. Either we were ripped off (accidentally, perhaps) or they were charging us more than 5 Euros for each drink. We paid it, and it was only afterwards, when Julie and Scott started comparing notes, that we agreed that there was something wrong. We didn’t go back.

Instead, we went to Dock 10 where we expected the boat to be arriving. The woman who sold us the tickets looked shocked to see us. We had expected the boat to leave at 12:35. In fact, she said it had left at noon, and there would not be another boat until 14:00 (2:00 PM). When we read the schedule originally, we were looking at the time that it left the museum, not the time it was leaving from here, so that was our mistake. (The ticket seller also pointed out that she had sold us only three tickets. For whatever reason, Scott still needed one. We don’t know why she didn’t see that before. We assumed Emma didn’t need one.) So anyway, we had some choices to make and weighed our options.

We decided to wait for the next boat, but that meant we had more than an hour and a half to kill. We walked back along the docks for a ways. We visited some of the gift shops filled with nautical nonsense. We watched the boats coming in and out of the busy harbor. But ultimately, we waited in the hot sun, and this would eventually make us extremely tired when evening came.

Scott enjoyed a nice moment of his own when he took out his mp3 player. There’s been several times during this trip when he wished he had loaded up the right music before we came (Mozart for Salzburg, Wagner for Neuschwanstein, and so forth) but this time he had exactly the right music for exactly the right moment. He listened to “Songs of German Emigration” while watching the ships leaving and coming from the harbor and Hamburg. He was hot and sweaty, but content for the moment. The other three were just hot and sweaty.

When the boat came, we boarded it (along with a noisy party of older Germans who were drinking the beer that the mate was selling from the boat’s stock). We were expecting a water taxi, but instead it was more of a sightseeing cruise. We took a circuitous route around the harbor, which could have been interesting, except that the captain was narrating in German, the boat was small, crowded, and hot, and we really just wanted to get to the museum.

Then we arrived at the focal point for our day- Ballinstadt. Ballinstadt can be seen as the beginning of the road that ends at Ellis Island. Millions emigrants from many European countries funneled through the port of Hamburg on their way to the promised land of America. Ballinstadt was begun in 1901 as a place for those travelers to find shelter and food while waiting for passage to America. Today, several buildings from that complex survive and it has become a museum about the emigrants that traveled from and through this city.

The museum itself is a nice one, and tells many versions of the story that Scott and Julie have had to teach about many times. The first building is where you buy the tickets and orients you to the others. It also has computer terminals to search the Ballistadt records, but since these were in German and were basically coming from datebases that are available in America, we skipped past these.

The main part of the museum starts in the second building. As you enter, there are several mannequins and each represents someone from a different country at a different time. Next to each of these people are phones to listen to their stories, and a button to choose German or English narration and you are introduced to some of the “typical” stories of the emigrants who passed through Hamburg. The next exhibits show what kinds of things that they had endured in Europe, what made many people decide to emigrate, and what Hamburg was like when they made it this far. A large boat-like structure divides the building down the middle. It sits in water and invites you to enter it through gangplanks. Inside of it, the trip across the Atlantic is represented by films and artifacts. After you leave it, you are in America. One can see what it was like for the different classes of passengers as they arrived in Ellis Island, and what the neighborhoods were like that they often populated in New York, Milwaukee, and other American cities. Some people chose to go to South American countries, and their stories are represented here as well. The exhibits are interactive and creative. The final room in the main building has mannequins representing the people who we started with. They finish their stories and we find out what happened to them after their journey. Scott was most intrigued by the German from 1848 who had fought for a united, democratic Germany, but having lost, left for America with people like Carl Schurtz, and ended up fighting for a united, democratic United States in our own Civil War.

The next building is set up to show what Ballinstadt itself was like, being a small community of ever changing members with the steady flow of emigrants coming and going. Dorm beds are set up, and trunks between them explain daily life for the people there. Then the most exciting part-- for Scott anyway-- was the gift shop. While browsing through the many interesting items, Julie found him a CD called “Via Hamburg to the New World: Emigration Songs.” When Scott saw it, he did the happy dance. He bought it, of course, and later had to go back for an English language book about German emigration through Hamburg. You can probably see now why listening to his other songs about German emigration while sitting on the Hamburg docks had been such a moment for him, in spite of the hot sun.

We then had a journey of our own to complete. We had to catch the boat at 4:35 from the Ballinstadt docks, ride it for the rest of its tour around the port of Hamburg (past at least a few interesting ships, anyway), catch the subway back to where the car was, and then find a place to sleep for the night.

We stopped for “Joey’s Pizza” along the way. “Joey’s” is a German chain that we’ve seen before. We were still hoping for hamburgers, but the girls are really enjoying the European style pizza that we got in Italy and other places in Germany. Its crust is very thin-- about the width of the “thin and crispy” crust at Pizza Hut, but it isn’t crispy like that, usually, although “Joey’s” is crispier than the others. The pizzas are maybe ten inches across and are meant for one person to eat. Since we’re used to ordering the thick American pizza, and since we’ve got three girls that usually don’t eat very much, we’ve been trying to make due with two of them. It hasn’t been enough. We ordered three of them tonight, because Anna especially enjoys wolfing down the thin slices.

After we got the car, we were stuck in rush hour traffic jams like you’ll find in any big city, with stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper traffic on both the city streets and the expressways. We finally found our way out of town.

Our plans had to change at this point. The original hope was to visit Lauenburg today, where the Langhans family is from (Scott’s paternal grandmother’s family). Because of our delays, we had to scratch that from the agenda, at least for today. We also scrapped the bigger plan of going on to Copenhagen, Denmark. We had hoped to drive at least part of the way tonight, and finish the drive tomorrow. We could then take Anna to the famous Tivoli amusement park for her birthday and visit the Little Mermaid statue in the harbor as part of an abbreviated tour of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. The fact of the matter is that we’re just too exhausted to do that. We’re tired, and all of us are getting grumpy, and none of us wants to spend the time in the car that it would take to get there and get back. That means that Hamburg will end up being our northernmost point on this trip (Hallstatt, Austria, was our easternmost point. The waterpark near Verona, Italy, was probably our southernmost point.) So we headed south, and found a little place to stay just outside of Munster like the cheese, (we think), but not like Hermann (we hope). If the signs on the roadside stands are anyway to judge, they are more proud of their Kartoffeln (potatoes) than their cheese, anyway.