Hello again, Hamburg!

During a visit to family in Hannover, we decided to take a short trip to Hamburg again, so that we would be able to visit the "Miniatur Wunderland", an enourmous miniature railway exhibition that's said to be the largest in the world, and one of hamburgs main attractions. We hadn't been able to make it there on our visit to Hamburg earlier this year, so this time we specifically planned the trip around our visit to the exhibition.

We had two days in Hamburg, arriving via train in the morning on the first, taking the train back on the evening of the second day.

Upon arrival in Hamburg we took a stroll through the city, walking through the old town, visiting the Jungfernstieg and then making our way through the city to the Speicherstadt. On our way we came by the "Mahnmal St. Nikolai" - the ruins of a church, and a remaining churchtower, now used as a viewing platform, and a museum that tells the story of the WWII Bombings of Hamburg.

There we also wanted to check for tickets for the same nights musical shows, since Hamburg is Germany‘s capital of musicals. We managed to get two tickets at good prices for the nights performance of „Tanz der Vampire“ (the musical adaption of Roman Polanski‘s „Fearless Vampire Killers“) then continued our walk through the city until we could check into our Hotel. We had Lunch at the „Brooklyn Burger Bar“. The burgers were pretty good and the staff nice. We didn‘t care too much for the sweet potato fries there, but the regular fries were good.

Once we had eaten we felt up to another round of sightseeing and made our way to the "Elbphilharmonie", a concert hall in Hamburg, infamous for it's special architecture, as well as the misplanned construction that took years longer than expected. It has a viewing platform though that gave a great few over the Elbe and the Harbour, especially since we had made it right before sundown - the "blue hour".

Afterwards we finally checked into our hotel and got ready for the musical, which took up most of our evening. We did go back to the hotel to grab our cameras again, returned to the Speicherstadt and took some nighttime pictures from the Poggenmühlenbrücke, one of the most iconic photospots in Hamburg. Then suddenly at maybe around 12 the lights turned off and we decided to go back to get a good nights sleep before our trip to the Miniaturwunderland.

The next morning after breakfast we went to the Miniatur Wunderland right away. We had all our stuff with us, so we put that into the lockers (which were a bit small for out backpacks - the next time we‘ll do that differently). Then we started looking at the exhibition. In the beginning we looked at all the little details and spent really long for every small section. But after the first few hours we realized we hadn‘t yet even seen half the exhibition and continued on a little faster.

In the end we spent seven hours inside, including some time off for a little lunch, but we still felt we hadn’t seen everything. The last few sections we kind of went through very fast and I think we missed quite a few interesting things. On the other hand our heads were so full of impressions that we really couldn’t have looked at everything that much more closely. But we really liked the whole thing. We’ll probably be back some day, and then we can still take a closer looks at the things that we might have missed this time.