Hamburg, day 2

We've been in Europe a week now. Hamburg, our present location, is a pleasant city, and until this afternoon we had lovely weather - perfect for wandering around in a park, which we did, and climbing up the base of a huge stone statue of Bismarck that we found there. This statue was pretty imposing; it was perhaps 30m tall, made of grey stone, and depicted the Chancellor standing straight up in a cloak, holding a massive sword in both hands, with muscular eagles perched at his feet on either side of him. The base had lots of crevices and handholds that made for good climbing, which JV took full advantage of.

Food here has tended to be heavy on the meat and potatoes, with not a lot of vegetables or fresh anything. I made sure to get fresh tomatoes and orange juice for the lunch we made for the apartment today. We made lunch for everyone today - part of the couchsurfing idea is that you have a bit of give and take with your hosts - and the apartment we're in is full of guests now, so cooking for everyone meant a fair amount of food. It's a very punk set of people, as we expected. We've had an interesting stay on Veddeler Bruckenstrasse. Our host, Jonas, taught us how to skip fares on the trains. We'd noticed that nobody checked our tickets on the way out to Jonas's suburb. Jonas instructed us that if we were ever caught skipping fares, we should just show our foreign passports and give foreign addresses. The Hamburg authorities follow up with fare-jumpers by mail, and if your address is outside Germany, they never go to the trouble. But we've never been troubled so far - skipping fares in Hamburg is literally as easy as walking. You just walk onto the trains; there are no turnstiles or anything, and then you walk off. We are all a bit curious as to whether the Hamburgers in general pay their fares or not. No-one seems to force them to. I recalled Alexander Herzen's comment to the effect that the German is stopped by his conscience where the Russian is stopped by a policeman.

Yesterday we walked through downtown Hamburg to St. Nicholas', which is a church spire that has been preserved, surrounded by several sculptures, as a monument to victims of the Nazi regime. The spire is there; most of the church is not - I guess it was destroyed by the Allied bombing - but on the ground, different colored stones trace the outline of where the church once was. There was an elevator in the spire, which you can take up to see the view, but it was closed when we were there. We also wandered by St. Michael's church, which had a big dramatic statue of St. Michael beating down a demon over the door.