This one will be as brief as my stopover, and I wish I’d done it more justice. One doesn’t always have the opportunity to stay in a UNESCO-listed district.
From Northeim and Göttingen, I came full sail into the Hanseatic port city and made a beeline for the Speicherstadt. No Deutsche Bahn mishaps this time!
The Speicherstadt is the largest warehouse district in the world, a collection of brick buildings on oak foundations, connected by bridges across loading canals. The first and only hotel here is the Ameron Hamburg Hotel Speicherstadt, itself housed in a historic building. The sober facade belies a glossy operation, with slick spaces, dark wood, leather and brass accents, and the kind of crisp, but also kind hospitality I am always so grateful for. My room looked out over the Am Sandtorkai, and was furnished with a nautical print on loan from the museum, a cheerful yellow headboard, a rotary phone, and welcome chocolates.
I’m not the type to cram top 20 activities into an afternoon, but despite the heavy skies I thought I would venture around HafenCity. I eventually found myself at the International Maritime Museum that had lent several of its art pieces to the Ameron. The neo-Gothic Kaispeicher B warehouse is home to an impressive private collection, assembled over the years by a devoted founder, Prof. Peter Tamm. And while the various decks contain a multitude of nautical treasures, everything from 55,000 miniature model ships to globes and charts and weapons and engines and navy uniforms, my favorites would undoubtedly be the replica of a limestone relief depicting a sun boat, (the original resides at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin), and an imposing model of the Wapen von Hamburg III convoy ship suspended against an appropriately stormy backdrop.
Fascinated, my inner nerd and I stayed so long though that we didn’t have much time for anything else but dinner, which was then followed by a suitable nightcap at the bar, and then a night of peaceful slumber. In the morning it was down the lift, across the covered bridge over a canal to a bracing breakfast in the restaurant with the red-and-navy patterned chairs, and then back to Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, where I lost my travel pillow in the shuffle — it had a cosy little hood you could pull over your head so I still feel bad about it.
Thus I finally left the land of the Grimm folk and rain-soaked mariners, and steamed away for Hans Christian Andersen country.
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