Day 3: September 4-5, 2015 –
When we woke up in Copenhagen the next morning, it was pouring down rain. We had woken up early, to given ourselves enough time to get to the train station without feeling rushed. We gathered everything that we needed, secured to our packs, then quietly left the apartment. When we arrived out on the street, the rain was coming down in sheets. We were dressed in a few layers of sweatshirts, but the water was quickly soaking us to the bone. We power walked through the parking lot behind the apartment building, passed the graffiti walls, and continued through the pedestrian tunnel, just as the 5A bus was arriving at the stop.
The bike lane that was previously flooded with commuters, was now a babbling brook with only a few cyclists braving the weather. We hopped on the crowded bus, which felt like it was steaming up. The fog on the windows made it hard to see out to the dark gray clouds beyond. The bus was packed to the gills and with every stop, a few more passengers were getting on. Around 20 minutes later, we finally arrived at the Kobenhaven H, (the Copenhagen Central Train Station).
We crossed the two bus lanes, hopping over the puddles, and jogged into the train station. Copenhagen has a fairly large train depot with lots of tracks leading toward Germany, Sweden and beyond. While it wasn’t as large as Grand Central Station in New York, you could see that it could be really easy to get disoriented and miss your train, if you weren’t really paying attention. It was going to be our first experience with European train travel. While by the end of our trip, we were going to be experts on the rails, we were a bit anxious to find out where we were going to be departing from.
I waited in line at the information booth in the center of the station, to see if the attendant had any information about where the train would be departing. I hadn’t learned this yet, but the people at the information booth in train stations have just as little information as you, in most cases. They have a little computer in front of them, and maybe some trains come and go from the same tracks every day, but that doesn’t mean that someone in a little booth has to know more than anyone else. I think that they are pretty much there, just to give someone to complain to, and be told that there is nothing that can be done.
After I waited 15 minutes in line, the woman at the window informed me that I would simply need to look at the LED sign with the city names and times, to find out the track number. If the time, city name, and train number wasn’t listed, we would just have to wait until the sign changed. We learned that in most cases the track listing would pop up on the screen about 10-15 minutes before the train departed, so more times than not, if you got to the train station 20 minutes early, you were going to have to wait, at least, 5 minutes in the main concourse before you knew which platform, that you were going to be standing on for the next 10 minutes.
There were quite a few newsstands and eateries in the con- course of the station. There was a 7-11, McDonalds, and a few places that sold coffee or pastries or both. We split up and bought some breakfast, then continued to check for the track number on the LED screen, and just chilled on a bench for a little while. Breakfast for me, then consisted of a Monster Energy Drink, a donut with pink frosting, and a piece of chicken on a skewer from 7-11. I also picked up an additional apple pastry for later on in the trip, in case, I got hungry on the train.
Since we had arrived to the train station “airport early”, as we began to call it, we were able to people watch for quite a while. There seemed to be a large number of children in school uniforms running around the station, completely unsupervised. They didn’t look like they were being monitored by a teacher or chaperone, and I imagined parents in America freaking out, that they could’ve been kidnapped or taken into a men’s room by some deviant. If anything, I almost felt relieved that we don’t live in a world where parents are completely scared of everything, everywhere. This is the first reality check that people in America are way more paranoid, that something is going to happen to their kids than elsewhere. Even though, America is probably the safest that it’s ever been, the internet and other media has people brainwashed into thinking that evil is around every corner. Elizabeth commented that they were probably on their way to Hogwarts and I laughed.
As time got closer to our train’s departure, we looked up at the sign and saw that our track number had been revealed. We went down the escalator to the platform, and shortly after, the train arrived. We didn’t have assigned seats on this train, but we were able to sit at a table on this train and work on our blogging and sketchbooks. Looking out the window on the train, we were reminded of the Midwestern United States. There were lots of farms, cows, open spaces, and lines of trees to divide the properties.
It’s no wonder that the German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania and Ohio and felt right at home. The trains traveled for a few hours from Copenhagen to Flensburg and then another train would take us for a few hours from Flensburg to Hamburg. While on the first train, I received an email that said that instead of arriving at the Hamburg HBF (the main central station in Hamburg) that we were going to be arriving at Hamburg-Altona. While this stop was supposedly closer to our Hostel, I was still thrown a little off guard at the change in destination. For a little while longer, we would have free WiFi on the train, so I looked up the directions from the new train station to our Hostel. This was the first time that I really started to get anxiety and paranoia about our trip. We had a breeze in Copenhagen with a cellular data plan, but we were headed into a new country, where my trip book was being becoming obsolete.
Everyone in Copenhagen spoke at least a little bit of English, if they weren’t completely fluent, but as soon as we arrived in Germany, it was like we were in a different world. Somehow to my ears, the Danish tongue sounds soft and inviting, while the German tongue sounds like a manic, dictator’s speech. If you aren’t on top of things, if you don’t have your train ticket ready, when they get to your seat, you could feel like you are being confronted by the Gestapo. While in Copenhagen, I was confident enough to ask lots of questions, but in my motherland of Germany, I was feeling shy and passive.
I know a bit of German. Enough to order coffee, cake, and beer, but when it comes to asking directions; even if I could spit out the right words, I doubt that I would be able to understand, where they were telling me to go. So when we arrived at the Hamburg-Altona train station, in the late afternoon, I was completely on edge. We walked out of the train station and out into the world and all I could think about was how much I needed to get the iPhone working, to tell me where I needed to go. Everyone was speaking German and every sign was in German. The neighborhood around us looked fun and cool, but because we had our giant packs on, I figured that we should at least stop at the hostel first, before going out to see what Hamburg was all about. The shops at the harbor would probably be closing soon, along with the miniature museum, which means that we unfortunately weren’t going to be checking those things out. Our main priority, at the time, was to find a way to the hostel, to drop off our packs and then figure things out from there.
Across the street from the train station there was an outdoor bus depot, with a bakery and some ticket machines. There were lots of buses coming and going and different signs with bus numbers on them. While Elizabeth was hungry, so she went over to the bakery, I looked over the ticket machines to try to figure out how to buy a ticket in German. I had written down the bus number and the stop, when I was still on the train, so I decided that if I could just find the bus, then I might be able to pay on board.
Eventually, I saw our bus parked across the station. I walked over and tried to communicate with the driver. I knocked on the door and in broken German, asked the bus driver, if I could just pay for a ticket with coins, instead of buying a ticket. It was a very confusing, interaction because she didn’t know any English and my German probably sounded more like gibberish. Somehow, though she let us on and then drove the bus across the depot to the actual stop, then we were joined by all the people that actually knew what they were doing. We stayed on the same road for almost the whole trip, but luckily, our hostel was on that road, so we would just have to get off the bus, and cross the street to get there.
The name of the hostel that we were staying at was creatively named, The Hostel; which made us think of that horror movie, where some kind, decent folks, go into a hostel in Europe and then get murdered. Our hostel was about 30 minutes away from the city center of Hamburg. Probably a 20 minute trip on the bus to the Altona train station, and then 10 minutes on the subway. Or we could walk 15 minutes down a hill, through a residential neighborhood, to the closest S-Bahn station, and take a 15 minute train ride to the central station.
It was close to 5pm and raining, when we arrived at the hostel. We buzzed in and went up the stairs to the front desk. There, we talked to the 20-something, Middle Eastern desk clerk, about how to get to downtown Hamburg, where we could lock up our bags, and where we could get a SIM card for the cell phone, so that we could get a data plan. He told us that we could get a SIM card at a shop in or near the main station, Hamburg HBF. We paid him in cash for the beds, went to our room, and we changed out of our traveling clothes, and into our city clothes. We locked up our huge packs in the basement, where the clerk suggested, and started our German voyage. When originally planning for Hamburg, I anticipated every- thing going fairly smoothly, we would arrive at the central station, go to the harbor, the miniature museum, and then still have time to set up and do caricatures on the boardwalk to make some extra money. Although, with the rain coming down the way that it was, and the fact that we got dropped off at a different train station than we expected, our plans were quickly becoming foiled.
Instead of taking the bus from the Hostel, which seemed like it would take us out of our way, and take longer to get to the HBF, we walked down a winding, residential road, to the S-Bahn station. It was sort of miserable walking in the rain, but it was also cool to see how similar the suburbs in Hamburg were to some of the East Coast American cities. There were lots of oak and maple trees, and red brick houses and apartments. I started thinking about what it might have been like living here in the 1930’s and 40’s, and how exactly the Nazi’s took over this place.
We arrived at the S-Bahn station, bought a couple of tickets, then took a guess as to which train, we would need to get on to get to the HBF. We picked the right one and then sat on the train until we got to the main station. As soon as we arrived, we started looking for a shop that would sell us a SIM card. We probably spent close to 20 minutes walking in circles in the station, until eventually, we gave up.
It was here at the train station, that we encountered our first pay toilets in Europe. We both went down the steps towards our respective gender’s restroom and discovered that it was going to cost us €1 to enter. I quickly reached in my pocket and found enough change to make €1 and then grabbed the coupon that came out of the machine, just in case it meant something. Elizabeth had come back up the steps because she didn’t have any Euros, but I wasn’t there. I waited outside the women’s room for her to come back up and then I handed her €1.
I was getting really hungry, so I went out to the French fry trailer that I saw outside of the station. The fries were hot and delicious and came with one of various sauces. I picked curry. I went back in the station to wait for Elizabeth and then we shared the fries.
We started walking around again to look for a place that looked like they sold phones. We ended up seeing a sign for a place called Saturn, that we assumed could sell any number of things, but was just as likely to sell SIM cards. We followed the signs from the train station to the store and ended up walking through the automatic doors of a 4 story tall, electronics store. As soon as we walked in, we should’ve known, that this was going to result in a disaster. Corporate stores like this are always insistent on working 100% legit, and are never willing to meet you where you are. Sigh.
We went from floor to floor looking for the cell phone section and eventually we made it. I managed to buckle down and speak my best German. I wanted to find out, if I could use one of the many prepaid SIM cards on the wall of cell phones on the 3rd floor of the store. I stopped a female employee walking passed the wall of SIM cards and she told me that I would probably have to go to one of the Turkish shops down the road, because all of these SIM cards needed to be registered in Germany. I picked one up anyway and walked over to the aisles lined with demo cell phones and waited for one of the clerks to address me.
In America, you can’t walk into a store without 5 people bugging you to help you buy something, but in Germany, I was practically invisible. Eventually, I was able to talk to a staff member that, spoke just enough English to inform me that he wouldn’t be able to activate and register one of the SIM cards without a German address. I asked him, if I could use the address of the hostel that I was staying at and he said, “No.” and walked away. I had lost track of time, so I didn’t notice that the gentleman was trying to give me the blow off, because it was getting late and the store was closing.
There was an announcement in Germany over the store PA, but I didn’t understand what it was saying, and I had to pee. If we went back out to the train station, the price to use the public toilet was €1. I thought that I would be better off using the WC in Saturn. If I haven’t mentioned it before, WC is what is on the sign for the restroom, not the green sign with the man running for the door, which is the sign for emergency exit; even though more times than not, by the time I found a restroom in Europe that I didn’t have to pay for, it had become an emergency.
We went to the bottom floor, which is where the WC was located and I enter through the steel doors to the hallway where the men’s and women’s restroom entrances are located. After relieving myself, I pulled the door that leads back to the store, and it was locked. The door must automatically lock when the store closes. I pulled again and knocked on the door, which luckily, had a circle window in it. I looked out to see Elizabeth looking around and start walking to the other side of the store. “Noooo!!!” I was freaking out. I banged on the window, made crazy faces, and hoped that she would turn around to see me. Somehow, I managed to catch her eye and get her attention, and she walked over to let me out. For a second, though, I thought that I would be stuck there all night.
We took the elevator up, to where we found the exit out of the store, then we walked out as quick as we could. The clerks all glared at us, as we were keeping them from getting home, but we sort of just shrugged our shoulders and kept walking. We decided that from there we would walk to the other side of the train station to the Turkish neighborhood in Hamburg, and stop in a store that was also most likely closing.
At this point, Elizabeth was no longer entertained with my pursuit, and felt like it was pretty much a waste of time to continue looking for something that was taking up way more time that it needed to. I, on the other hand, was determined to make this happen. How hard could it be to get internet on a phone?
We stopped into one of the shops, where we met a nice clerk from Istanbul, who spoke pretty good English. He tried a number of SIM cards in the iPhone, but he wasn’t able to get the internet to work. I thought it might have been, because the guy in Denmark might have locked the phone to only work in Denmark, but I still can’t be sure what was really happening. Even though, the store was closing, the clerk was able to get us an O2 SIM card that would supposedly work in Germany AND other countries. Unfortunately, we wouldn’t be able to have a data plan, just talk and text. Like most other small businesses that we would discover, this one did not accept credit or debit cards, only cash. So after giving him more cash that I probably needed to, to not really get what I wanted, I settled for what I got and just accepted that I wasn’t going to have a data plan, at least for a little while.
I was a little frustrated by this, because we basically wasted 4 hours chasing after something that didn’t even end up happening. We were completely exhausted and Elizabeth just wanted to go back to the Hostel. I managed to convince her to stop in the Paulaner bar for a beer, because I thought we earned it. I ordered a Bavarian white sausage, a pretzel, and a tall beer. Compared to the US, the beer seemed really cheap in Germany. We were able to get .5 liters of beer for €3,50, which I thought was a steal.
Even though we both felt pretty defeated, we managed to muster the will to go to the harbor, just to take a look. After getting on the wrong train a few times at the HBF, we eventually made it to the correct S-Bahn stop. We walked down the tunnel, and as soon as we walked outside, it started raining again. We walked along the boardwalk and we learned that my theory was correct. This would’ve been an excellent place to draw caricatures during the day. However, it was around 9pm and everything was closed. There weren’t any people around, on the boardwalk because of the rain, so we took a few minutes to look at the ships in the marina and then moved on. Still optimistic that we could make something of the evening, we decided that we might as well get a drink. We walked down the road perpendicular to the harbor and managed to find a little strip with a few bars and restaurants. Personally, I was at a point, where I felt like I couldn’t possibly make a decent decision on anything, so I let Elizabeth choose the place to get a drink. I followed her into an Italian restaurant that she didn’t think it would be a good place, if we were just having a drinks.
After going down the street a bit, we went into a place called the Bairro Bar. It was lit with red lights behind the bar and was dark pretty much everywhere else. It had huge portraits on the wall of Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie. We ordered two Franziskaner and chips and salsa, then found a couch in the front lounge area, where we were reclined next to people who were mellowing out for the night with their significant others.
If you live in San Diego, salsa and hot sauce are a large part of your diet, and restaurants are basically rated by the quality that they carry. If you are the type of person that thinks that salsa from a jar is a sin to eat, when compared to fresh Mexican salsa, then you would cringe at the quality of Hamburg salsa. While the salsa had some tomato base to it, it tasted and had the consistency of ketchup, with virtually no spice.
Even though it was only 11 pm, we decided to walk back to the train station, where we took the S-Bahn back to our stop and hiked back up the hill, through the residential neighborhood, and up to the hostel. It had been such an exhausting day, that we couldn’t imagine ourselves enjoying our walk back down the hill in the morning to catch our train out of Hamburg.
When we got back to the hostel, I managed to finally get on the internet with Elizabeth’s buggy iPad, to connect with Marko Holtwick and Jeremie in Bruxelles. The iPad kept crashing, so it took me a hour to write only a few messages. Jeremie gave me updated information about his address, and Marko sent me his phone number through Facebook. So, even though I wouldn’t have internet access for the next few days, I did have a SIM card that I could call and text on, so I would just text Marko, when I was on my way to Holtwick, Germany. By the time I was finished setting everything up for the next day, it was 2:45 am. We had to wake up at 6:45am to start walking to the S-Bahn station to get to the Hamburg HBF, so I maybe I slept for about 4 hours.
Places We Bought Food and Drinks
Hamburg HBF Frite Trailer
Hamburg HBF Train Station If you need a quick bite at the Hamburg HBF, the Frite Trailer outside the front entrance will provide you with a big paper cone full of fries and one dipping sauce for under €10. While there are fast food counters in the concourse of the station selling low grade corporate owned food-like stuff, this independent cart has some of the best curry fries outside of Belgium.
Paulaner’s Miraculum Kirchenallee 47, 20099 Hamburg, Germany After working up a thirst from tracking down a sim card, we stopped into this pub/restaurant a stone’s throw from the train station. While we thought that we might stop in for just some beer, they also had Oktoberfest favorites like weiss sausage and giant pretzels. The food menu was pretty minimal, but they had a long beer and wine list. When in Germany, I prefer a heifenweisen to wash down my pretzel and bratwurst. The bartender was also courteous and pandering to our kooky American behavior.
Bairro Bar Ditmar-Koel-Straße 24, 20459 Hamburg, Germany We popped into this whole in the wall, a few blocks from the harbor, in a long strip of bars and restaurants. While every other place is closed by 10pm on a weeknight, this place was still pretty busy. They have a limited food menu, but quite a few beers on tap. I ordered up a Franziskaner and some chips with salsa. While the beer was cold and tasty, not even the floor to ceiling portraits of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie improved the taste of the salsa, which might as well have been ketchup. I’d say, bring your own salsa or order a different late night snack.