Travel Day

It seems ridiculous to declare today a travel day since we are gone for a mere 8 days and we traveled only 90 minutes away from Berlin to Hamburg. But that's what it seems to have become as we sit here waiting for our son to be finished with his class so we can go to dinner.

We managed to get to the Hauptbahnhof in Berlin a half hour before our train. Here is a compliant traveler picking the appropriate recycling bin for his banana peel. Our train sliently glided to a stop soon thereafter.


The streets of Berlin may be littered, but this train was so clean you could have eaten off the floor. It exemplified the obsessive German mentality I had expected to find everywhere.

Upon arriving in Hamburg, as we studied our city map, we were approached by a very toothy woman who declared her love of America in English and wanted to help us. It was never too clear whether she was really just well-meaning or entirely nuts.

We checked into our hotel, which costs considerably more than our funky Berlin apartment and has about 25% of the space. Everything is very compact, as is illustrated by this shot of my husband checking his e-mail.


This picture of the beds shows an interesting German phenomenon in that the pillows are about 3 times the side of pillows back home.

After learning that breakfast at the hotel would cost 11 Euros each, we opted to walk around the block to the Toom megastore and buy 13 Euros of groceries that would easily feed us breakfast for the next 3 days.

We are in the far suburb of Altona one subway stop from where our son lives. It would seem that we will need to take a train to anything of interest.

We're just hoping that the next couple of days give us the sunshine Hamburg enjoyed this afternoon.

Here's a picture from Berlin of our son standing in front of a graffiti-ed chunk of the remains of the Berlin Wall. He looks like a typical German, ja?