Night train to Germany
The great thing about living in Europe is that you can travel anywhere by train. And with a night train, you can go to sleep in your home country and wake up on the other side of the Alps!
This is the second time I've taken the OBB (Austrian railways) Nightjet from Rapallo to Munich. It's so convenient - get on the train one stop from home (unfortunately it doesn't stop in my town), wake up in Austria, have breakfast (included in the ticket price) and get off in Germany!
This time I discovered the difference between the couchettes and the sleeping car service. I had booked a bed in a sleeping car, but they actually put me in a couchette, because there wasn't a sleeping car available. I still got the sleeping car kit, though: a pair of slippers, a washcloth, an eyemask and earplugs, a pen with which to select your choice of breakfast foods from the menu, and... Ein Glas Sekt!
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| Passing through Genoa on the OBB Nightjet at aperitivo time |
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| Guten Nacht! |
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| Breakfast in Austria |
München
Munich is Germany's third-largest city, and the capital of Bavaria. Of medieval origin, the city has risen in importance as a centre of art, architecture and science over the past two hundred years. I have been to Munich twice before, both times in December, in the snow; the city looked quite different in April, with the new leaves such a bright shade of green, the tulip beds and the lilac trees in blossom.
My personal tour guide for the day, Barbara, didn't take me to Marienplatz and the classic tourist spots I had seen on my previous visits, but to some of her favourite neighbourhoods, starting with the "French quarter" to the east of the river Isar.
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| The Japanese teahouse |
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| View from the Greek temple |
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| The Chinese tower |
Next we were treated to a tour of the university physics lab where Emma's husband Quinten works, with a brief but baffling explanation of his work with semiconductors. I wasn't sure if I might get him in trouble taking pictures inside the lab, so I settled for one of a scary sign on the door 😄
The afternoon continued with a stroll around the lively Schwabing district, where I met a walker who will surely be in Rome well before me!
Having visited the French quarter, the English Gardens, the Japanese Teahouse, the Greek Temple and the Chinese Tower, having plenty of time before our dinner reservation at an Afghan restaurant.... Barbara and I decided it was time to do something German! And so we sat down in a traditional Bavarian beer hall over a big (small by German standards) glass of beer. Mine was a dunkel Weißbier, proving that the Weiß in Weißbier actually stands for wheat (Weizer) and not Weiß (white) - however magical German beer may be, it cannot be both dark (dunkel) and white at the same time! 😅
We then walked from the city centre back across the Isar to the Gasteig district to meet Emma and Quinten for dinner at the excellent Afghan restaurant where we had dined together in December, Chopan am Gasteig. Munich has an abundance of intriguing ethnic restaurants of all kinds, and I figure I will have plenty of time to eat German food on my way walking back down the country!
I still had some time to wait before my Nightjet train to Hamburg. Barbara kindly kept me company even after I had retrieved my backpack from the trunk of her car. We sat chatting on a bench in the underground station rather than stand in the corridor of the cold and comfortless Ostbahnhof (Munich East) railway station. But eventually the time came to emerge above ground; a last-minute change of track added a touch of suspense and excitement to the evening, and then the Nightjet from Innsbruck finally steamed into the station (figuratively speaking) and I located the appropriate sleeping car - important, as the train splits in two along the way, and only half of the cars go to Hamburg, the other half to Amsterdam!
I had been looking forward to the ride on the new OBB Nightjet rolling stock, in service only since December, featuring individual mini-cabins in the couchette car. Mini is definitely the right word - this is not the way to travel if you suffer from claustrophobia, or have a good-sized Bavarian beer belly, like the poor gentleman squeezed into the cabin just down the hall! I doubt he got much sleep.... But I was perfectly comfortable in my cabin, and slept much better than on the previous night's train because the new trains have a much smoother ride and don't roll and jolt you about like the older rolling stock on the La Spezia - Munich line.
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| OBB Nightjet mini-cabin |
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| A touchscreen in the cabin allows you to control the colour and intensity of the lighting, see whether the washrooms are occupied, and call the attendant to order food and drinks |
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| It's less claustrophobic if you block the door open in the morning |
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| Breakfast time! |
The Nightjet rolled into Hamburg Hauptbahnhof 150 minutes late. Luckily I had notified my contact in Hamburg, Claudia, of the delay. Claudia is a Servas member, a retired German teacher who speaks perfect English because she has lived in the USA, and a big fan of the Camino de Santiago: as soon as I read her profile information on the Servas website, I realised she would be the perfect person to meet up with in Hamburg!
Hamburg
Claudia said she would meet me at the train station "under the flowers", and it took me a few minutes to figure exactly where she meant... though once I spotted it, it was obvious!
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| Hamburg: Hier beginnt das Aufblühen "This is where the blossoming begins!" |
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| Hamburg Hauptbahnhof |
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| With Claudia and der Wasserträger "Hummel, hummel! Mors, mors!" |
The story goes that when the city was conquered by Napoleon, the French introduced croissants, and the local bakers attempted to imitate them ...but they didn't turn out quite the same 😄
Hamburg is Germany's second-largest city, after Berlin, with a population of almost 2 million; the population of the Hamburg Metropolitan Area exceeds 5 million! Germany's largest port, Hamburg is located where the Elbe River branches out to begin its 110-km-long estuary flowing into the North Sea. The city has survived a series of disasters - destruction by the Vikings in 845 and by the Polish in 1030, the Black Death which killed over half of its population in 1350, Napoleon's conquest of Hamburg (and the subsequent failure to make proper croissants 😄), the 1842 Great Fire of Hamburg, the last major outbreak of cholera in a European city (killing 8600 people in 1892), World War II bombing and the North Sea flood of 1962. The city has survived all these calamities and grown into a major centre of industry, media, finance, science and education. Hamburg is the birthplace of former German chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Angela Merkel, and the city's former mayor, Olaf Scholz, is the country's current chancellor.
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| Hamburg around 1600 by Georg Braun/ Frans Hogenberg |
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| Hamburg Eilbek after the 1943 bombing Photo by Royal Air Force photographer J. Dowd |
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| Flooded streets in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg in February 1962 Photo by Gerhard Pietsch |
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| Rathaus |
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| Luxury shopping gallery with Art Deco ceilings |
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| Monument to the dead of the First World War |
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| Stolpersteine |
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| The tower of the bombed church of Saint Nicholas |
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| Stepping into a moving elevator... Surely this is against European building safety regulations?? 😆 |
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| The river ferries mainly transport workers |
Fun fact: The original hamburger
The term Hamburger steak was first added to the Oxford Dictionary in 1802, defined as "a sometimes-smoked and -salted piece of meat that, according to some sources, came from Hamburg to America." The original may well have been the Hamburg specialty Frikadelle, a rounded, flat-bottomed, pan-fried meatball, also popular in Denmark, Poland and Scandinavia (think Ikea meatballs!). Curiously, frikadel are also made in Indonesia and South Africa, where they were introduced by the Dutch and are made primarily of mashed potatoes, with only a small amount of ground meat.
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