Hamburg: part 1
(First of all, photos are here.)
Words fail me in attempting to describe Hamburg. Unusually for me, I shall have to have recourse to a thesaurus. Let’s see now…for starters, squalid, odious, stagnant, foul, scatologic, Fescennine…I could go on, but I think you get the point, even the less articulate among you. The place is a fucking dump. I wouldn’t go back there if you paid me.
Yeah, so I had a great time. And ironically, this is one of those rare and precious moments when I’m not being sarcastic. If you think about it, though, this was the perfect holiday for me: what’s my favourite pastime, after all? That’s right – complaining! And for three full days I had solid gold material from which to spin my elaborate tapestry of bitch.
Shall we begin? Oh, let’s shall!
For starters: Stansted. Dear Stansted: I hate you and I fucked your mom. Love, Robin. I’ve seriously had it with Stansted airport. SiC and I got up around 11.00 on Friday, thinking we had heaps of time to make our 4.00 flight. I packed, he packed; we went to the bank, we hailed a taxi; and all of a sudden we realised we had one hour to make it all the fucking way across London to catch the airport shuttle. SHIIIIIIIIIIT! Cue much running around and swearing at slow-moving shoals of tourists and swearing at ticket machines and swearing at the Tube and some swearing for good measure. Thanks to some inexplicable glitch in the space-time continuum, we got to Tottenham Hale on time to catch the 2.20 shuttle to Stansted, and we rejoiced at our good luck. Hooray! Hamburg!
What fools we.
As usual with Ryan Air, the flight landed in some ramshackle, miniscule excuse for an airport about a thousand miles from the purported destination; so after spending a whole day on taxis and trains and Tubes and planes, we got to get on a bus (just for variety!) and drive over an hour into Hamburg. We looked around as we approached the city centre. “Looks a bit shit, doesn’t it?” said SiC.
“Yeah,” I said. There didn’t seem to be a single building without elaborate graffiti or more than fifty years old. I figured we must have been passing through a bad area. We finally got to the central station and caught a taxi to our hotel.
The hotel, to be fair, was fucking mind-blowing. The girl at reception was dumber than a peanut (spoke perfect English but took ten minutes to figure out that ‘Robin’ was my first name and ‘Smith’ my last name), but we eventually checked in and went to our room and life began to seem infinitely better. The bathtub was the size of a swimming pool and the room itself could have easily encompassed all the flats I’ve lived in since I moved to England, and that is a lot. We hit the minibar and threw our stuff all over the floor, as you do; thus rejuvenated, we headed out on the town.
We’d heard that the hotel was close to the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s famed red-light district. We followed the flashing lights and noise and emerged onto a street that looked like a back alley in Vegas that had been liberally sprinkled with rubbish and dipped in Beirut. It was seedy, to put it mildly. The strip clubs featured photos of women who looked like they’d seen better days, like, before the war, and one of the sex shop window displays included a statue of a dog peeing on one of the mannequins (titillating!). There was enough garbage to fill a landfill and an accompanying stench that could have downed an ox.
The punters were the best bit, though – a motley throng of badly-dressed, ugly, staggering, thick-necked, bellowing ghouls (and that includes the women). As we picked our way between festering mountains of offal, drinking bottles of lager, SiC remarked, “This is the first time I’ve ever walked down the street drinking a beer and still felt classier than everyone around me.” I think that sums it up.
We did a tour of the area, saying “What the fuck?!” a lot (“Is that a drawing of a cat with breasts? What the fuck?” “‘Peep Live Show’?? What the fuck?”) and eventually settled on an Irish bar because it looked the least likely place to be exposed to inappropriate nudity and noxious American stag parties. After paying five Euros each to get in the door (the first time I’ve ever had to pay to get into an Irish pub), we sat at the bar and started pouring drinks down our necks with a vengeance.
We were shortly adopted by a very shouty Norwegian who was very angry about…something, and a couple of very shouty Americans who were very…American. “Hey, I like Americans,” I said after the Norwegian made some insulting comment. “Whenever I’ve travelled to the States everyone has always been really nice.”
“Really?” shouted one of the yanks, swaying slightly. “I fucking hate Canadians!” Then he dropped his beer on the floor to prove his point.
The Norwegian tried to engage everyone in a drinking contest, which ended with no clear winner due to all the shouting and stumbling and dropping (if you go by sheer pugilism, the American won, not surprisingly). A Swiss bloke stumbled up to us and leaned on me a bit too much, and when I asked him nicely to please remain upright under his own power he bent over and stared intently at my crotch. What charm! He continued to blearily leer at me and generally make a twat of himself until SiC brought him to the attention of the bar staff. Then, in a remarkable display of prescience, he silently handed me his drink before being hauled off his feet and lugged out the door.
The evening continued along these lines. One of the Americans asked our advice on how best to cheat on his girlfriend (“Are you asking us how to procure the services of a prostitute?” “No, no! I just…you know.”) and the Norwegian was spotted in the toilets letting out a feral howl as he stood at the urinal. I spilled Jagermeister all over myself.
At the end of the night SiC completely forgot the injunction on mentioning the war: he misinterpreted the words to a song and kept singing the chorus as “I will be your Nazi girl” despite my frantic attempts to shush him. He kept this up all the way back to the hotel, where we stopped at reception for alcoholic reinforcements.
“How do we get more beer?” SiC demanded.
The receptionist visibly recoiled at the very sight of us. “There is ze minibar,” he snooted.
“Yeah, we drank that,” said SiC. “Can we get more beer? Sent up?”
We were promised six bottles of beer (presumably just to get us the hell out of the lobby), of which we drank two before retiring for the night (read: passing out cold).
To be continued…