Europe 2013: Ze Bike iss Repairt

August 27, 2013

Lissen has introduced me to the German version of what I have called "dankey deutsch" -- where one consciously speaks a language incorrectly. They call it Denglish. As I'm basically living life in German right now, it's easy to transition to English by way of Denglish. Hence ze funny titel.

My first task for the day, of course, was to drop the bike off at the shop so they could replace the chain. After a relatively lazy wake-up process, including finishing off the bread I've been carting around since Scotland, I dropped off the bike shortly before 10. They were kind enough to stick my giant yellow riding suit and helmet in a corner so I didn't have to carry them around the whole day, and I set off for my day of tourism.

The first stop was to mis-remember the map, and wander farther than necessary in search of the U-bahn (subway) station. I got to see some of the lovely neighborhood around Suederstrasse, although I was disappointed that I didn't see a single hooker (Lissen assured me I was in the right area to find them). Then it was on to the U-bahn to downtown.

What I did downtown is now a bit of a blur. I have pictures to remind me, but there's not a whole lot to tell in any case. I was mostly marking time until the bike was done, but I figured as long as I had the opportunity, I'd take some pictures, and see bits of Hamburg I hadn't really seen before. I naturally found myself on the Rathaus (town hall) square, since the building is ridiculously pretty and covered in the finest gingerbread. I also took the new U-bahn line, the U4, to one of the new stops in Hafen City, which is a new part of Hamburg. It used to be enclosed in an ugly fence, and only used by the port, but has been reborn as Hamburg's newest neighborhood. I'm actually pretty excited that Hamburg is building new U-bahn lines, in the same way I'm excited to see light rail progress in Seattle. It's fantastic to have the system around and replacing car trips.

Hafen City itself, particularly stepping out of the station, is almost desperately barren. The first thing I saw was the raw earth of a construction site. It was only when I turned around that I saw the new buildings and attractions, such as they were, of Hafen City. Hafen, by the way, is the word for harbor.

I went past the maritime museum, but didn't really want to get myself into a potentially hours-long pursuit when the call about the bike being ready might come at any time. In fact I was wandering an elaborately beautiful concrete dock looking at ships when the call did come at 2 pm.

My adventure downtown actually started out with me thinking to myself, "Oh, I should have brought my water bottle." There followed at least 30 minutes of me looking at stuff, and being increasingly aware of my thirst. I finally got a small icecream cone on the Rathaus square, then found a small market and bought a liter and a half of water, slightly disgusted with myself for contributing more to the waste stream than I needed to. But I wandered the shopping street near the Rathaus, which included curiously walking over to a Breitling watch display in a jeweler's window. My eye sought out the watches which include (because I'm a huge nerd) the circular slide rules around the bezels. The first one I saw was a mere 5600 euros, and the next a paltry 19,000. I didn't see much difference between the two. Presumably the 19,000 euro watch is made with the jeweled tears of the last extant unicorn, kept in captivity and forced to watch "The Last Unicorn" over and over in a top-secret Breitling facility deep in the Swiss Alps, and the metal smelted from ore collected from Mars and returned in a top-secret Breitling space ship. I think in my shock I failed to actually take a picture of the display.

I've just bidden Lissen farewell for this trip, but already there's talk of her returning to Seattle, which would be awesome. She has to work early in the morning, and has a full day tomorrow, so I'll get my stuff together and head for my former host family in Glinde tomorrow morning. They're champing at the bit to see me, and it will be good to catch up.

As I mentioned earlier, the call did finally come at 2 that the bike was finished. I made my way leisurely towards about where I thought I could find an U-bahn station. My feet, unused to so much walking in the motorcycle boots, were complaining quite a bit, and as is natural in these situations, I couldn't for the life of me find an U-bahn station. I finally had to sit down for a moment and pull out the map I'd bought, and get myself pointed in the right direction. Since it was fortunately just at solar noon, I had a fine sense of where south was, so it wasn't hard to figure out which way up to hold the map. What was hard was making sense of the twisty, turny streets in that part of town and figure out how I should walk to inflict the least abuse on my poor feet.

I did quickly thereafter find an U-bahn station, and got myself back to the dealership (still another 500m of walking beyond the closest station). I arrived very glad to have an end to the walking, and wandered around looking at bikes while another customer completed his business. When I pulled out my card to pay for the repair, the guy behind the counter said, "Are you paying with cash, or with an EC card?" He then saw I was reaching for a Visa card and said, "Unfortunately, our system doesn't take Visa or similar cards, just EC" (EC is a European standard system, which naturally none of my cards belong to). I didn't have 325.55 on me, so I had to hoof it most of the way back to the station to find an ATM. I figure I walked between 5 and 10 km today.

After all that, I came home, took a quick shower, and fell into the finest dreamless sleep I've had in a while. I was tired. Nearly falling-over tired, just from all the walking.

Part two (or three, depending on how you count) of the day started at 6, when Lissen and I headed out to meet her friend Evi for dinner and a bit of bigband jazz music. I actually knew (or at least knew of) Evi back in 91-92, but she didn't remember me at all. It was nice to meet her all over again, and we had a very good dinner at a restaurant near her workplace. The conversation ranged all over the place, and it was pleasing to me that I understood a large majority of it. I even participated a bit, although I still feel like I have to prepare whatever I want to say in my head before I say it (this is also true when e.g. talking on the radio while flying, so it's partially just me being me).

Then we walked the short distance to The Cotton Club (est'd 1959) to listen to the Stintfunk Big Band (the name is apparently a play on the name of a youth hostel where some members met, lo these many years ago). It was easily the whitest jazz band I've ever seen, though if you overlooked a certain lack of swing (by which I mean the technical musical term), they were quite good.

Then we decanted ourselves into a taxi and headed for home, via the chess club that Evi helps out with (although in exactly which capacity, I wasn't clear). It is, she says, the largest chess club of its kind in Germany, and just celebrated its 175th anniversary as a club in 2005. Not bad.

That puts us at bedtime, but before I lay my head down to sleep, I had another minor gear update. This is as regards the Eagle Creek packable backpack I picked up based on Amazon reviews. It is generally pretty good, but it suffers from two pretty noticeable faults, both to do with the zipper. The first is that that the zipper runner absolutely loves to grab little fabric rain-flap, and it's basically impossible to open or close without folding the rain-flap back. I believe this is because the fabric is so thin, so as to be packable. The other fault is that if you leave the zipper runners near the top of the arc, and there's even the slightest gap, then the weight of the contents will slowly but surely pull the main pocket wide open without any warning. Not a huge deal as long as you're aware of it, but I found myself wandering a store in Wales with my pack hanging open, completely unaware of the fact. I only figured it out when we got back to the car. Fortunately nothing was missing, either from falling out, or sticky fingers.

Next up, a bit of packing, hanging out in Glinde, and then off to the Nuerburgring and Austria.

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Created by Ian Johnston. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net.