hamburg and kiel

so in an unfortunate badminton accident on monday night (read: rachel destroying me at badminton and then me spraining my ankle) i only went to work 2/5 days last week. haha the badminton was fun while it lasted though, definitely not my best sport but good exercise anyways. my foot swelled up to the size of a football and i took the next couple days off work to hang out and read a bunch. miraculous recovery to be able to more or less walk in a few days and then it was off to hamburg on thursday night from basel. got in pretty late, and met up with a friend of ours that was working here at alstom. hence, we got a place to stay and after a few beers went out to see what there was to do on the town on a thursday night. after walking around for awhile, we settled into a pretty cool retro/oldies bar. pretty much nobody in there but the six of us danced the night away regardless. really cool music, some drum and bass on top of 60's big band music, a crooning version of wonderwall, and solid old music. played some pac man on the atari that was there, and drank one or two or three cuba libres for cheap! thursday night meant no s-bahns after midnight, so after some mac donalds and an hour night bus later we got to sleep.

a good sleep in meant a late but delicious and cheap breakfast bought from the grocery store. it was really awesome to stay and hang out with people from hamburg, it's completely different being shown around by people that live in the city and makes you feel so much less like a tourist. after breakfast we headed out on a bit of a tour around the city, walked through some of the main parts of town, the rathaus, the lego store where i bought a lego stormtrooper, a miniature model of the city, this very cool shops/cafes trendy area. it was super cold out though, windy and a lot of snow - a lot like home, more so that here in switzerland. definitely cool to see everything though - really there's not too much that is blatantly striking or amazing, but the whole atmosphere was pretty laid back, lots of cool art and graffiti, great little shops and cafes - i would say it's a really 'livable' city if that makes any sense. after sitting down for a cup of coffee for awhile, we headed towards the harbour to see what was up there. basically it's the biggest harbour in europe, connected to the north sea, so more or less all of the shipping out of germany that goes anywhere has to go through here. there were huge cranes as far as the eye could see, docks, ships, freighters, pretty much any type of sea faring vessel could be found here. the fog and the cloud and the snow just added to the atmosphere, pretty cool place. proceeded to eat another pickled herring, onion and pickle sandwich - it sounds horrible and the bad breath after is horrendous but tastes delicious. a nice walk along the boardwalk took us towards this underground tunnel that stretched under and across the river - basically this is the only way to get across the harbour - obviously bridges would get in the way of ships! this night we had purchased tickets to go see 'walking with dinosaurs' in an arena close to hamburg. massive animatronic dinosaurs complete with sounds effects and dino battles, pretty cool i thought. too bad the commentary was in german, but really giant very lifelike dinosaurs are cool no matter what. i would definitely see it again in english, they were so cool. after the dinosaur show we hopped onto a train for about 1.5 hours to kiel, pretty much the most northern city in germany to visit our friend holly for awhile. got there quite late, chatted and the went to sleep putting 5 people in a one person room.

woke up and had some chocolate sprinkles+peanut butter on toast for breakfast, went out to explore the town of kiel. it was quite cold and windy and there was about a foot of snow on the ground. there was a pond where there were about a thousand waterfowl gathered in the small part of the water that they cut the ice out of. attacked by geese, and swans which are kind of terrifyingly big. kind of just wandered through the town, and ended up at a kebab shop where i was defeated by one of the biggest doners i've had. tasty though. we headed towards the train station to hop on a train for about an hour to another city, luebeck. it is a quaint old town that has a bunch of old buildings and churches and a neat city gate. walked around for awhile, ate some marzipan, got the feet nice and soaking wet, and then settled in for a coffee before taking the train back to kiel. went shopping for some dinner at the grocery market, food is so cheap. and also beer as well. went out to a student bar that night - terrible music really but still a good time, and then ate the sketchiest kebab at 5 am before going home to sleep it off. sunday was a bit of a write-off as we had to get back to the hamburg airport, and after a late night out we all slept in. on the way to the airport though, we managed to miss the bus, the train, the train to the airport, but fortunately did not miss the flight. also drank a lot of iced tea on the way for some reason. in any case it was a wintry weekend with some great friends and more or less hanging out more than sightseeing which was really nice actually.

back to work for the week, ankle is healing but i'm sure it'll be nagging me for awhile yet. it's finally a bit sunny outside and i hope this is the start of spring. not too much planned for the week, going to warsaw on friday so another bit of a short week.