Last stop in Germany...Hamburg

Well our Hamburg visit didn't get off to a good start. We arrived at our Pension to discover that the double room we'd booked was actually a twin share and when they said that there was a "private bathroom" they actually meant a shower at the foot of one of the beds. Literally just a shower (with sliding doors and a nice bit of mould, but no separate room). So anyway we decided it wasn't for us and cancelled the booking and found something else. It was a bit on the dodgy side but at least there was a separate room for the shower! We had to laugh though.

So we did a tour bus trip of the town, which is quite pretty when you get to the outskirts - lots of trees and greenery - reminded us a bit of Vienna actually as there were lots of grand homes painted yellow and white.

The cool thing they did have in the centre of town was a man-made lake. On the one day when it was sunny it was beautiful sitting on the side of the lake sipping our hot chocolates and eating our kartoffelsuppe...hmmm! Even though it was sunny it was still freezing though. Winter is definitely coming...I even had to go out and buy a coat, scarf, and some gloves...eek! And they're shopping district was quite impressive. Two pedestrian strips of shops as well as lots of galleries and passages all with boutique style shops and cosy cafes.

Matt's favourite stop in Hamburg was a place called Saturn - a four story electronics and multimedia shopping centre, apparently the largest in the world. Actually that was something we noticed in our travels around Germany, they've got a claim to fame for something..."insert German town here" has the world's largest, longest, fastest, tallest, oldest, prettiest "insert random object here". It was funny when we started noticing it on every tour we went on! But needless to say we spent a lot of time in Saturn and Matt was very close to buying a laptop, if only it wasn't for the German QWERZ keyboard...

So we probably stayed one night too long in Hamburg and unfortunately for us our hotel was in a seedy part of town. But the tour that we did and the shops that we found made it worth the stop. And the delish cake that we discovered called Marmurkuchen - chocolate and vanilla marble cake covered in chocolate icing...oh yeah!

Our next stop was a bit of a detour from our original itinerary - Brussels, only a 60 min plane ride away...