June 2013, 1st week -- playing host in Hamburg

[Man kann eine deutsche Version hier finden]

I've decided to start travel-blogging in both languages, writing the German version first and then writing an English version. If you'd prefer to read the German (or just look at it or something), you can find the general German-version-blog here and the `version' of this particular post here.

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This is mainly about the visit of a friend of mine, J. But, before that, a little about a street festival around the corner from where I live (Eppendorferlandstraßenfest).

EPPENDORFERLANDSTRAßENFEST (1st-2nd of June)

"The 32nd Eppendorfer Landstraßenfest wass on the 1st and 2nd of June. Music, culture and culinary "(stuff) as well as the beloved flea market draw in 250,000 visitors to one of the most beloved street festivals in Hamburg" 

I thought the street festival was quite nice. The flea market porion was a good half of the actual street which was blocked off, about 4 or 6 lanes/rows deep. I bought a danish cashmere-silk sweater which is quite lovely (and the only thing I own with yellow in it).

The other half had little stalls, two stages of music and a lot of things to eat. We ate something arabic one time and another time some delicious "Spanferkel" (slow-roasted-on-a-spit young/suckling pig). Sehr lecker! (very tasty!) At the end, there was a "fire show" done by a woman who danced with lots of things you could set on fire, including a hula hoop with knobs sticking out at regular interval (which were set ablaze, rather than the whole hoop).

Eppendorferlandstraßenfest

Eppendorferlandstraßenfest: Flammlachs!

Serving as ``host" in Hamburg: 

• die ALSTER und die ELBE(04.June) 

A while ago, my friend J. said that she needed a reason to finally apply for her passport. Naturally, she should fly to Germany and visit me! She found that the flights into Hamburg were quite cheap (200-500 euros cheaper than flying into Frankfurt), so her first leg landed her here.  It worked out well, as this was her first time outside the states and first time dealing with jetlag. But she managed to sleep the entire flight, so we were able to go exploring the first day and enjoy the awesome sunshine.

We first went in the direction of the Alster, the (accidental) lake in the middle of Hamburg:

when you want to have it good, go to the Alster

nice yards along the Alster

She needed to make a pit-stop, so we ducked into Dammtor, a train station. Like many places, we had to pay for the toilet, which surprised her (I remember when I was surprised by these things too :) ).

We eventually met up with a friend of hers she'd hung out with on motorcycles in the midwest, around the Jungfernstieg stop. We were all hungry, and I suggested going to Deichstraße, the quaintest chunk f Hamburg, for dinner.

back-side of Deichstrasse

It took a while to walk there from the Alster, but we were enjoying the sunshine (which we don't get much of here), so it was fine. We ate at the  ,,Kartoffel Keller" (potato celler).

I wanted J. to have a really German meal, so I suggested the (white) asparagus with (thin, delicious black-forest-esque) ham and potatoes, all slathered in hollandaise sauce. After our very German dinner, we kept on walking, to the (rather nearby) Speicherstadt (~warehouse district) and the Elbe.

a somewhat "iconic" picture of the Speicherstadt

a view in the direction of the harbor, from the Speicherstadt

the they'll-never-finish-this-damn-thing Elbphilharmonie

A pleasant surprise! I'd heard before, that a normal ticket (for bus, metro, etc) was also valid for these little ferries that run around the harbor. I saw a public-transit-ticket machine on a pier/dock. Could it be? Why yes! A ferry we could take for a whopping 1,50 euro, instead of the >20 people pay for a harbor tour (where you can't understand the tour-giver usually anyway)! So, we bought our tickets and wended our way around the harbor, getting off around Landungsbrücken and hung out at Strandpauli.
They have an artificial beach there with sand and beach-ish chairs, as well as a nice view of the harbor.

I had a cider (Aelbler, a hamburg brand) and J. had a "Cuba Libra". I was getting pretty tired a bit before 23 and left J. to hang out with her friend while I went off to rest. I had, however, completely forgotten that I had set my phone to a daily "do not disturb" setting between midnight and around 8 am, so they had trouble getting ahold of me outside of making it back to my apartment and ringing the doorbell. It had worked surprisingly well to startle me out of a snooze at 2 am.

• Planten un Blomen und Övelgonne(05.-06.07)

I took two days of vacation for the next two days (a Wednesday and Thursday). The sunshine was sticking around, so I was very happy to be outside, wandering around.

We went through Planten un Blomen, a big park in Hamburg, which clearly was built on/made out of the old city fortifications/moat area. You can see this on the following map/picture; the zig-zag of the old moat, and the "Gorch-Fock-wall" -- no more a wall, but just a street in the city.

Planten un Blomen 

When you go far enough through Planten un Blomen, you wander into another park, to the southwest. Here's roughly where that began:

steps and fountains 

Planten un Blomen had a lot of plants and streams. Here's a nice little stream:

At the very end of this second park is Sankt Pauli. We'd reserved places in an English-speaking tour of Sankt Pauli, so we went through, but not trying to hard to see anything in particular. We ran straight into the Sankt Pauli Nacht(wochen)marktt, a weekly food/wine/music sort of market (kind of like a small farmer's market). We had a glass of wine (2,40 euro or so?) and sat and ate. I had bought some bread, having asked for the most seed-filled, thickest, heaviest bread they had, and shared it with J. in addition to some other foodstuff we'd bought.

St. Pauli Nachtmarkt

Hamburg has a really nice beach,  Övelgönne (which is a word I have trouble pronouncing).  I suggested that we head that way, and we took a bus most of the way. There was still a stretch left to walk, but it was still sunny, so quite nice.

view of some ships from our walk to the beach

a yellow ship, from the beach

We stayed until (roughly) sunset, then found another ferry we could take back:

Ferry 

We took it to Landungsbrücken. It was a nice trip and really a great way to get around the harbor area. 

view from the ferry of the Elbphilharmonie to the right

view of Landungsbrücken

And that was only the first bit!

Stuff left:

• our Sankt Pauli tour 
• trip to Dernau/Mayschoß (for a Wine blossom festival) 
• a bit about my work-related travels in Copenhagen

Lille, France and Brussels, Belgium (Pfingstferien, 19 May - 26 May 2013 + some September 2012)

I found out two Wednesdays ago that our students would have a week vacation for "Pfingsten". This apparently is a University-level decision. That is, some universities have a week off, some don't. Everyone has that Monday off, as it's a public holiday. Due to the technicalities of vacation time in Germany, I also designed it to be a "working holiday", so the touristing stuff was on the weekend and late afternoons.

Discovering this, I decided that I really ought to see some friends I haven't seen in a while but have been meaning to (former residents of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois as well) in Brussels and also see my good friend who is in Lille, France, as she leaves Europe to move back across the ocean soon.

I bought a roundtrip flight through Brussels and also (by walking in to a DeutscheBahn travel center) bought TGV tickets between Brussels and Lille; by (fast) train, it's about 30 minutes.

While waiting at the Brussels  airport train station, I noticed this Mannekin-Pis Cola machine. Well. It is a symbol of Brussels.

Here's the view pulling out of the train station. Bears some resemblance to all main train stations I've seen in Europe, I suppose:

Brussels by train

[LEUVEN]
I stayed over in Leuven when I arrived and the night I left. My friend D. is a pleasant 5 minute walk from the main train station there, which is a 15 minute train ride to Brussels-National airport.

Leuven is a funny town with sister town Louvain-la-Neuve, which I talked about before (at "case in point...").

I arrived a bit late-ish, so didn't snap many pictures. This is the view from the main train station down towards their cathedral:

I did take some pics of my friend's swank flat, but it feels a bit weird to just toss them up here, so you'll have to trust me that it is swank. 3 of the 5 or so (depending on how you count) rooms in his place have (filled in) marble fire places, and there are some awesome chandeliers.

[LILLE: May 20th until 25th + September 2012]
The title says "+ September 2012" since I had been to Lille once before, a middle-small-sized town in the Flemish bit of France. It is really a lovely town, and a good blend of Dutch and French sensitivities (French:
2 euros for the best cheddar/brie/etc you'll ever have!
8 euros is 'too much' to pay for a good bottle of wine!
Dutch: 
Meat! Beer-y meat!
Delicious beer!
More beer! ;))
I'm also told that despite being in France, people tend to drink beer with meals instead of wine.

That does not keep them from speaking French, however. I was thinking (again) this trip that French is a really "wet" language. Like you always need some reserve spit hanging out in your mouth to properly say words like "rouge".

Lille has made its "name" by being that place where the train dumps you off in France when coming to France from London. Some people just change trains and head on to other places in France. The rest just hang out and go shopping. As a result, there are a lot of people wandering around speaking English, and the staff at the more centrally-located shops tend to speak some English as a result, which is nice as a foreigner.

When arriving in Lille (specifically at the train station Lille Europe), one is greeted by the Eurostar building, which reminds you, in case you didn't know, that the town you're in has a name that begins with the letter "L":

Adjacent is a nice mall abutting a giant French version of target/walmart, Carrefour. Everything from "Je t'aime" baking tins to 2 euro cheddar to random clothing. The mall itself is full of fashionable-yet-affordable (mainly) stuff. I got a few things there and had fun looking around.


The sort of main square area:

Those polls show where cars can drive. Confusing the first time through.

I think some of my main thoughts walking around both Lille and Leuven is that it's clear (or, at least, seems so) that these places did not get obliterated in WWII bombings, unlike a lot of towns in Germany. Either that, or they had top notch reconstruction efforts.

The following is a fantastic example of German-style humor (wordplay):

Fleur de Lille 

[FOOD IN LILLE:]

My first day in, we met several other math people and went to dinner at Café Leffe. I really enjoyed the "English" menu. I took a picture but it was too dark to be really legible. My favorite items were:

CONCERNING PORC WAY BIG MOTHER about 300 grams. (cote de porc façon grand-mére)
and CRUNCHY OF GOAT (which was a goat cheese and crostini salad, I believe)

The next day, we ate out again after watching a practice job talk, at Les 3 Brasseurs. I had a flammküchen (spelled roughly the same as in German), which is kind of pizza, but with super thin crust. For dessert, I had to try the one that came with a bit of everything (it was all amazingly delicious):

Coffee + a shot of something + 3 tiny desserts

French desserts do a good job of being both rich(i.e. fatty) and sweet.

We also ate several times at Exki, which has delicious tarts, quiche, and other healthy-seeming foods. They also have good coffee and free wifi. :)

Other expeditions were made to Le Pain Quotidien, which had nice food and coffee (and wifi), but was much smaller and so a bit cramped.


[SEPTEMBER 2012 IN LILLE:]

I took a day or two to walk around the place. Here's pictures I took along the way.

Seafoood mural on a seafood restaurant

This next bit was the main tourist shopping boutique-y area of Lille, in its old town:

the main tourist shopping area of lille

Random red building nearby:

This cool mirrored building abuts the end of the canal-formerly-known-as-moat (for the citadel):

cool mirrored building

Said moat/canal: I would doubt that there are any real fish inside. It smelled pretty rank (which might have to do with its history as a moat):

moat/canal with fish graffiti

The citadel which goes with said moat:

Citadel plaque

The citadel is still actively militarized, so the best I could do was walk up and take a picture of it from the bridge over the moat:

"entrance" (although, couldn't really enter)

Nearby (ish) to the citadel is the Zoo, which is free and public and rather sad. They had some white rhinos:

And some primates that seemed to have some fun hanging out on their fence and trying to grab things from the water. Or maybe just contemplate life: 

Lille has quite a few churches, some of which I just walked by and some which I went inside of.

Church fenced in by other buildings

cool church top

One had a really cool pulpit-thing (all wood): 

Like most old churches, these had lots of little niches, some with relics. This one contained the bone of a crusader: 

the very smallest topmost thing contains said bone

Also some mosaics which looked like tapestries to me:

mosaic-"tapestries"

another view of the wall mosaics and niches

The mosaics were also on the floor:

probably meant to represent Lille

Other stuff:

a rather modern window

If you walk south(ish) enough, you run into the Port de Lille, pointing Paris-wards (I think):

Port de Lille

[Brussels: May 25th]

To Brussels! I've been to Brussels properly once before, in November of 2009 (you can go back and see my pictures here and here (I also saw Amsterdam, Bruges and Ghent on that trip)).

I caught the mid-day-ish TGV/Thalys back to Brussels on Saturday morning.

Since I've done most of the touristy things, I was more interested in chilling out, enjoying the great weather and exploring.

First stop! Food, at this kooky place called "Ozfair"

the storefront

It was a good example of the kind of multi-use bizarro-zoning place we saw several of later. This place had:

• a small cafe-ish-area in the middle. 
• The front was (mainly) jewelry. 
• The back was some more drygoods-esque stuff, and 
• downstairs were clothes.  

We had the lunch of the day, which was some pretty good soup, nice bread (with butter! Bread never comes with butter in Germany) and some other miscellaneous stuff.

I bought a really cool necklace there:

blue! green! yellow-green! teal!

Around the corner was Hallepoort, which we looked at and into (apparently, it houses the military stuff museum) but didn't pay to enter the museum part:

Between this and the castle in Ghent, I have learned that Belgium might be the place to go for "castles"

Since the first trip to Brussels was so wet and my attempt to visit the flea market had been rained on, I wanted to make it this time. That was fun, even though we only saw it for a bit more than half an hour. 

View of the square via google streetview:

View Larger Map

There were no waffles in sight, but there was a cart selling oysters facing another selling snails.

This is clearly where you go to outfit your cool, trendy apartment in the Brussels-area. All kinds of beautiful plates and cups. Silverware. Do-it-yourself chandeliers. Miscellaneous furniture. Odd appliances.  The occasional bicycle. There was also a good bit of clothing and antiques. 

This was one of the weirder things there (oh, Belgium): 

All the streets have 2-3 names it seems (Dutch, French, and sometimes another (French?) name additionally). Rue de Renards/ Rue Haute/Rue du Faucon was the street that was on the edge of the plaza and lead upwards, which we walked up afterwards (and had walked down before). It had a lot of cool little shops, including one with some robots in the back.

on Rue de Renards/ Rue Haute/Rue du Faucon

on Rue de Renards/ Rue Haute/Rue du Faucon

We walked around the corner onto Hoogestraat.

Pretty buildings

There were some cool facing murals:

Also, along the way, some cute family-planning advertising (this was one of several posters, and the one that made me realize the halos were condoms):

condom-halos; Brussels: where "city planning" is not what you think it means

On this street, by the place that sold clothes by the kilo (15 euro/kilo) was a place selling kitchen supplies in a similar way:

We stepped into this shop which sold:

• Things you install in your home (e.g. fancy antique windows)
• Stuff to put inside your home (sofas and chairs)
• Clothes
• and also had a cafe area.

awesome windows above, tables below, and a mannequin with a sign that said the clothes were upstairs

looking down at the cafe

At some point, we'd also walked past a hospital with cool lettering:

We also came across an American-clothes store with a free in-store blues concert. They said they were part of the Brussels Jazz Marathon that weekend, which then explained the presence of this at Sablon:

Nearby: World Champion of Pastry, 1995? Way to rest on your laurels, guys ;)

Turns out, the cake was delicious (and not a lie). The one on the right is the world-champion-winning recipe:

Walking from there to the Grote Markt/Grand Place to meet up with the other former-Champaign-Urbana-ite, I caught a glimpse of waffles:

Waffle truck!?

and a very quaint little square:

pretty Belgian square nearish the Grote Markt/Grand Place

If you didn't know, Tintin (and some other famous comics) originates in Belgium. Thus, random Tintin murals on buildings around the city:

Tintin!

To come full circle, we walked through the street I remember which boarders on the Grote Markt/Grand Place, full of almost-identical restaurants all with 18 euro menus, with waiters standing outside, trying to beckon you in:

It was nice to be back in Lille and the Brussels-area. Sadly, much as "Wally" (of Wally's waffles) said, most of the Brussels-area waffles one can get are the "Liege"-style, where "fresh" means that they were made that morning and re-heated when you order them. We did sit down and have a waffle at a restaurant, but it was sadly overcooked. I guess I'll have to go back to Amsterdam for a proper Brussels waffle. ;)