The things that J. found the most astonishing:
1. That you're allowed to drink alcohol outside, wherever you want.
2. The BossHoss (German "country-western" band that tries to sound like they're Texan).
:)
At some point, we went to the DeutscheBahn travel center
, to buy J. a ProbeBahn25 card. I talked with the lady there for J. Afterwards, J. asked me what "Jo" means (Hamburgisch for "Ja"), because I said it so much.
STERNSCHANZE:
About sternschanze:
"The Schanze: This multi-coloured area between the Schulterblatt, Schlachthof and the Stresemannstraße changed back in the ‘70s into a melting pot of foreigners and punks, artists and freaks. A lot of small stores where you can shop til you drop, kebab shops, second-hand shops, Portuguese cafés and the omnipresent Asian Bok snack restaurants characterise the street scene."
I recently googled and learned that the name "Sternschanze" came from the former Fortress/fortifications, the fortress-part-of-which was star-shaped. "Schanze" is what that sort of fortification was called.
Wikipedia about it (called "Sconce" in English, apparently). It also made it clear to me why there's a street nearby called "Laufgrabe" (run/walking trench), which is a kind of thing you'd have at a fortress.
Altona_Hamburg_Harburg.png) |
| from wikipedia, with the Sternschanze clearly labeled. |
This wikipedia entry is about the fortifications formerly in Hamburg. Sadly, no English version. Anyway, they were built in 1682 and then were successful at repelling the Danish attempted-invasion in 1686.
We went into many of the little shops in the Schanze, and made sure to go into the one which sells only italian wine and leather-items (mainly shoes),
Scarpovino (Teuflisch gute Weine! Himmlisch schöne Schuhe! = Devilishly good wine! Heavenly beautiful/good shoes!).
I took a small break, to buy J. and I something to drink. We found for J. a gin&tonic in a can, and I had a cider. We sat on some steps and people-watched. Really a great place for this, many people, many things.
We eventually decided to eat dinner in the Schanze and sat outside a portuguese restaurant on Schulterblatt, across the street from the
Rota Flora.
There were two men who did a little juggling-etc. show while we were eating. Nearby were a group of clearly homeless people and a large collection of dirty (possibly feral) dogs running around.
S:t PAULI TOUR (Friday Evening, 07. June @ 21:30 Uhr):
I signed up J. and I for places in the
English-speaking tour of Sankt Pauli, offered by tha "Sankt Pauli Tourism" office.
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| Mural in Sankt Pauli |
It started with a long speech.
Our guide explained some of the history of Sankt Pauli, and the soccer club FC Sankt Pauli.
Originally, there was really on the HSV (Hamburger Sport Verein), but a lot of people felt uncomfortable or unwelcome in the stadium --- there were many neo-nazi fans. This explains some things to me -- a lot of "Fuck HSV" graffiti around town, and a sticker that said "Love Hamburg, hate HSV".
So, the people looked for another soccer club and found the (at least then-) small Sankt Pauli club. Their stadion was the first that had a rule that there was no hate-speech allowed. The club originally didn't have a (good?) banner/flag, until one day, when some guy game to a game waving a pirate flag. Everybody (except the club owner/manager) thought this was awesome, and for a while, people made their own skull-and-crossbones to wear on sweaters in support. Recently, the club was fighting bankruptcy and sold the rights to the skull-and-crossbones as their symbol, so it's become very commercialized.
We started walking in the direction of the Reeperbahn and discussed the following sign:
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| Forbidden weapons (and their pictures). |
There's a post-10pm ban on glass bottles on the Reeperbahn, and a 24/7 ("montags -sonntags") ban on weapons, with pictures of the weapons meant. They used to have CCTV surveilance (~3.5-1.5 years ago) but the people who lived in the area got upset and found it was violating their privacy and had it taken down.
This wasn't quite on the Reeperbahn yet, just nearby.
En route is the street Schmuckstraße. It was home to Hamburg's "Chinese quarter" (with maybe 100 chinese people). They were, surprisingly, left alone by the SS. It wasn't until 1944 that anything happened. The local police decided that they were suspicious, must be smuggling drugs, etc, and kicked ten out of town to concentration camps. There is no memorial for these people in Hamburg because it was the SS/military, it was the *local police* that had done this to them. Weird stuff.
Some people collected money to put up this small memorial-type poster for them:
Man kann mehr über der Geschichte
hier lesen.
Since then, in the 1970s or so, a bunch of
transvestites and transsexuals from South America moved to Hamburg to escape persecution and settled in this street. Our guide pointed out the otherwise unremarkable white building which housed them, those which had become
prostitutes. The discussion of prostitutes made it clear that there were a lot of them around. People watching was pretty interesting. Just look for semi-scantily clad ladies who very aggressively approach unattached-seeming men. There is a
documentary about the ladies who live in this street.
Our tour kept getting sort of jostled by all the other concurrent tours. It seemed like half of the Reeperbahn/Kiez was tours right then (22/22:30 on a Friday night).
Altona became Danish in the 1600s (due to the duke/Graf of Schleswig-Holstein dying and the title going to the Danish king because they were related). Denmark tried to declare that Hamburg was their's too, but Hamburg had just finished constructing its moat and walls and defenses, so successfully kept the Danes at bay. At the time, a big difference between "Denmark"/Altona and Hamburg was that Denmark allowed religious freedom, while Hamburg banned all church services outside of Lutheran ones.
Schmuckstrasse cross the former border with Denmark(i.e. Altona) of which there are only small remnants (there's a post with the shield of Altona on it, was part of the city "gates").
The first big street outside of Hamburg but inside Altona was "Große Freiheit" (big freedom), named after this big freedom -- of religion. There's a catholic church & nunnery there as well as a methodist thing around the corner.
Outside of the nunnery was the following (which I was asked if I could translate. Apparently not. The guide said that it means "There's nothing Jesus can't take"):
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| am Frauenkloster |
the view from the nunnery (Frauenkloster):
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| Große Freiheit |
Near the nunnery were the clubs known to Beatles' fans. The Beatles used to play at Indra and later Kaiser Keller, sharing the stage or playing between acts who never went anywhere (we didn't recognize the names).
Our guide assured us that in the building adjoining the nunnery, there was a "Live Sex Show", day and night. At some point the building burnt down completely -- he suggested that perhaps the nuns had something to do with it. It was, however, all for naught, as the same kind of show moved in after the building was rebuilt.
He also said that (on Große Freiheit) there are plenty of "classy" and decently-priced joints with even "nice" stip-shows. Dollhouse has ~ 50-50 men/women (unusual), Olivia Jones (famous local drag queen) opened up a for-women-only club (i.e. 100% men stripping). At Susi's, our guide said they'd invited all the guides to a show for free. No cover, 3 euro (instead of 13 euro) beers. He ended up losing his company-logo hoody and also his cell phone.
Unser Einführungsleiter erzählte, dass es vorher ein "Live Sex Show" im Gebäude genau daneben diesem Frauenkloster gab. Irgendwann, brannte dieses Gebäude (komplett!) ab. Er implizierte, dass vielleicht war es die Nonnen, die bei diesem kontinuierlichen Geräusch gestört wurden. Es wurde wieder gebaut, und in zog ein anderen so um.
At the end of this street is the Reeperbahn. "Reeperbahn" comes from "Rope" + "street". It was where rope-makers could easily lay out (and then wind back up?) their wares. It also existed outside of the actual city walls, as Hamburg threw everything outside the city proper which they didn't want inside.
This also included carnies, who they decided were suspicious. "Spielbudenplatz" (game/show tent/booth plaza) is where they used to camp out and do their circus-y things. Appropriately, that's where the Sankt Pauli Nachtmarkt is now.
Around the corner were places he said to avoid under all circumstances. These were on the Reeperbahn proper, claiming no cover and 5 euro beers. But then a woman would come sit next to you and order you two shots and champagne and when your bill came, it'd be hundreds or thousands of euros. He knew a guy who ended up with a bill of 6000 euro or so, refused to pay it, was drugged, woke up in the office of the strip club and had had his stuff stolen and they somehow managed to get money out of the ATM with his card.
We stopped in one of his favorite bars, on the street Hamburger Berg (Hamburg "mountain"), which was where (outside of old walls) Hamburg put things it didn't want. It's a mostly quiet bar on the corner of two streets, which maybe 10 things on the drink menu. Our guide recommended the "local" schnapps, Kümmel. I had a shot and found it perplexing, trying to figure out exactly what it tasted like. There was something in it that reminded me of celery -- the guide said it was that seasoning one uses to cook hard-to-digest stuff such as cabbage, and I figured it out -- Caraway seed! It tasted like caraway seed (which you use to cook cabbage and can also put in breads (which I remember my grandmother doing)). Strange. However, a fast application of google translate yielded that "Kümmel" is German for "caraway seed".
I thought this was a cute (and very German) name for a bar (it's near to the bar we went to):
Afterwards, all four of us on the tour (Jen, me, and two Canadians) were very tired and close to disbanding. Despite that, we trudged on to the last two things.
1.
"Davidswache" -- a very old police station, responsible for < 1 km^2, the main Reeperbahn area, with about 140 officers. He talked about how he (from a town an hour away) went to the Reeperbahn after pre-gaming a bit, black ed out around 1 am, and came "to" with himself unlocking his own door at 7 or 8am. He happily flopped into bed, to have his father call him and say "Davidswache called". Ba-dump, ba-dump. Dramatic pause. "They found your wallet".
Sidenote: several Germans I've met mis-translate "portmonee" as "purse", so, he actually said "purse" and I suggested "wallet". I mean, sure, plenty of men here carry a bag, but it's clear that he meant wallet in this context.
2. ,,Herbertstraße/Hubertstraße" -- the street of prostitutes. It had been cleared of prostitutes after WWI (in the 20s) and the name changed. They came back. The Nazis put up the barriers in front of the street (since re-inhabited by prostitutes) with the logic that if you can't see it, it doesn't exist. They also wiped the street off of all maps of Hamburg.
In closing, here's a mural in Sankt Pauli of the harbor:
