Hamburg - Part II: We're Here!

So after 4 hours on the train, we finally get to Hamburg. We ate at the train station and headed out to the city. Even though it was 1pm, the city was still pretty quite. We more or less followed the path shown by my guide book. We walked through the shopping district where everything's closed since it was Sunday. We looked at a couple of churches and then got to the Rathaus (City Hall). We all thought this place was really, really nice. There was a wine fest going on too. We all took pictures and continued walking.

Hamburg is a harbor city. It has many, many canals and waterways. It's a major river port so it's not near the ocean. We walked to the habor where they're building the new Hafen City. Still in construction but the plans for it looks pretty cool. They're building multifamily housing and retail right along the harbor. We walked around there for a while and went to look for a really tall church that we saw on the way there. We thought it was St. Micheal's church since that's really famous. But it turned out to be St. Nicholas' church. It was pretty impressive anyway. There was an elevator going up on the inside of it but we didn't go.

After taking pictures of it, we decided to go check out the botanic garden. We took the U-Bahn and got off right at the garden, which was really nice. I will have pictures of the garden in the next post. We walked around the garden for nearly 2 hours. Everything was really pretty. There were a fair amount of people there. We even saw people taking wedding pictures. They had a rose garden which had lot of pretty flowers. Some of the roses weren't in very good condition though. After taking this nice walk and eating ice cream (I've eaten more ice cream in the past month than I have in the past 2 years), we went back to the Hamburg Haufbahnhof. At the train station, we got Burger King with Carolyn's coupons and ate on the train. The next post is really interesting, I promise!