Hamburg, Lubec

Hamburg Harbour Houses
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Today we ventured out in Hamburg for a city tour with a local guide. This started with a bus tour around the older part of the city, looking at the old churches and buildings. We stopped at St Michael's church, which is a lutheran church. Against the normal tradition, this church is grandly decorated and had a massive organ. The congregation has just celebrated the harvest and there was lots of bread loaves displayed on tables. After this we boarded a boat for a water view of the Hamburg Harbour. With Hamburg being the second largest port in Europe, the number and size of the cranes in the port were amazing and getting a water level view of some of the massive bulk carriers was belittling to say the least.

St Michael's Church Altar
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After this it was back on the bus for a short trip into the centre of Hamburg to the City Hall (interesting that City Hall in German is called Rathaus "Rat-house". We were given free time to wander around and find somewhere for lunch. Near city hall there is a canal which across the other side is called "little venice". Walking up to the canal edge we saw a group of white swans just swimming around and waiting to be fed crumbs by anyone who would give them any. They would follow anyone walking down the path of the canal in the hope of getting some food. We were told a story that in winter, before the canals, lakes and rivers freeze over, there is a person whose job it is to capture all the swans (numbering about 120), and transport them to a place where they can live in the winter. They are then returned after the melt. This person is called the Swan Father.

Those ships are massive!

St Michael' Organ
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After lunch we boarded the bus for an optional tour of a nearby town called Lubec. This town was the centre of the Hanseatic League. Here we went on a brief walking tour with a local guide. We walked through the local streets with Una pointing out historic information about churches and local buildings. In olden times the people of Lubec were taxed by the number of windows and the width of their houses. As such, the fronts are very small, with few windows. Once you go through the front of the building, it opens up into an inner courtyard that goes a long way back with what looks like small communities almost.

Hamburg City Hall - Rathaus
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We also entered an old church which is now a restaurant, and on the ceiling is mounted old models of ships. When entering this restaurant I came across a guy who was sitting with his dog, which looked exactly like my dog Baz, but on steroids. It was a white samoyed and I just wanted to give the dog a very big cuddle, and made me miss my puppy.

After this we were given free time to walk around. We walked down to the old city gate to take photos of this old sentry-way.

It was back on the bus then and along the "ow-tow-barn" back to Hamburg. Here we had dinner provided at the hotel before retiring to our room for the night.