Since it was our last night at the Absalon we got up early to take advantage of their great breakfast. We arrived a few minutes before breakfast was officially served. The staff were a little grouchy about it, but they let us tuck in to our meal and get started.
We checked out and rolled our suitcase down the street to the train station, but this time around the front instead of the side entrance closest to our hotel. There were a few broken bottles on the street and we walked by a slightly scary-looking guy smoking on the steps – he was glaring at the ground but he looked up when we went by. I smiled and said good morning, and he gave me a big smile back and returned our greeting. Looks can be deceiving.
Usually we would take a train out of Copenhagen to get to our next city, Hamburg, but there was some construction on a train bridge in between, so the Danish rail company was providing a substitute bus service to bypass the construction. At the train station there was a bus already waiting, and we showed our tickets to the driver to get on board. At first there was only one bus, but another one arrived and started accepting passengers first – which caused a lot of unnecessary chaos among the confused passengers – which bus? Where does each bus go? I was first in line here but now I’m last in line over there – lots of confusion.
We got a front seat on the first bus out, sitting right in front of two people who Kuniko thinks were a Chinese mafia member and his wife. They smelled strongly of body odor – I needed to direct the air vent right at my nose to avoid the smell. Another slightly alarming thing was I noticed that the bus driver was a little shaky. Not only were his hands shaking but also his neck and head. Just from our viewpoint he seemed to be able to handle driving the big bus – actually, the fact that it was such a big vehicle probably helped him out a bit – but I wonder if the disease will progress into something worse. In my head I considered what would happen if we made a complaint later on to the management of the rail service. After all, if we are paying to be professionally transported we ought to have a driver that is in top physical condition. But then I thought about the driver himself – he was around my age and he obviously knows what is happening to his body, maybe he doesn’t have a lot of other career options (especially with a physical disease like that), and a complaint from passengers might be enough to cost him his job and perhaps put him in a precarious position economically. I turned the issue over in my head during the drive – some moral issues to help the time go by.
The bus ride was about two hours south to the coast and the port town of Rodby. We drove through mostly farm land, and we were able to see a lot of windmills. Not the old wooden kind, but the modern green energy type. There were some real monster windmills out there, and they stretched off into the distance as far as we could see. I was impressed that they went all in on green energy in Denmark. When we finally arrived at Rodby we got off the bus, got our suitcase, and then walked over to a train platform nearby. It was a very windy day (I could see why they have so many windmills) and in the distance was a group of goats head-butting each other in the field. It took about 30 minutes for the two-car train to arrive, and then we got on board. Again it was a chaotic boarding – but everyone got their seats and Kuniko ate some marzipan sweets (that we had bought all the way back in Ireland) to keep our energy up. We were sitting in first class so the seats were spacious and very comfortable.
From here things got interesting. The two train cars filled with passengers then proceeded a very short distance to the ferry dock and rolled right on to the rails inside the ferry. Once the rail cars were inside, cars and trucks drove in and parked next to the train cars. Once all the cars had parked, the doors of the train were opened, and we could proceed up to the top floors of the ferry. The ferry was multi-level – there were two other floors above us that also had cars, so that gives you a sense of the size of the ferry we were on.
Similar to the ferry we took from Helsinki to Tallinn, there was plenty to do onboard during the voyage. There were shops, restaurants, bars, and entertainment areas that had slot machines and other forms of gaming. Topside you could outside, but it wasn’t quite as much space as the Helsinki/Tallinn run. Since we had 45 minutes of sailing time, we bought some sparkling wine and French fries at the cafeteria, and sat near the front window and watched the coastline of Germany approach slowly. We had nice seats, and we shared our table with an older couple who didn’t speak English – but we managed to communicate with smiles and gestures. Out the window to our left (east) there were even more windmills forming a line offshore – there were some huge ones out on the sea.
About five minutes before arrival an announcement was made and we generally understood that it was time to go back to the train. We boarded the train (which had been locked up during the trip) and soon enough it moved off the ferry and on to German soil under its own power. For some reason there was delay of about ten minutes, and then we moved off towards Hamburg. From the ferry to Hamburg it was about a two hour train ride, but we made it in comfort in first class.
During the train ride I had a chance to overhear an interesting conversation from the people sitting a few seats away from us. They were an older New Zealand couple who were explaining to someone sitting near them about their travels. For the last six months they had been traveling around Europe, visiting various countries and living out of two suitcases. Apparently her hobby is making lace, so they have traveled to cities famous for lace-making, and the husband is into photography so he’s been documenting everything. The couple asked the passing train conductor to help them with their next train connection, and they quizzed him for almost ten minutes on the best way to go about it. Their seatmate got involved, and soon new options were coming up and everyone had an opinion. I’m not sure I’d like traveling with that kind of uncertainty – taking a poll from people who happen to be sitting next to you. I guess we’re more like “surgical strike” travelers.
Eventually the train arrived at Hamburg Central Station, and we walked through on our way to find our hotel. The station was big and busy – lots of shops everywhere (especially bakeries!) and the design was a nice combination of modern and traditional. Our hotel was very close to the station. We walked across a street, turned left, and entered a neighborhood that looked like Old Dubai in the UAE. There were lots of doner kebab shops, Middle Eastern grocery stores, two or three strip clubs, some homeless people laying on the street, and groups of men in traditional Arabic clothes here and there. And our hotel was tucked into an alley between all of that.
The front door of Hotel Terminus was locked. You needed to push a button to alert the front desk, and then they buzzed you in. We walked straight through a hallway to an unusual elevator that had two doors on a 90 degree angle from each other. The elevator doors opened and then you walked down half a flight of steps to find the check-in counter. The Middle-Eastern receptionist (and owner, I think) checked us in early despite our arrival time, and gave us a room on the second floor. He was the friendliest guy ever, and I really got a good vibe from him.
We took the elevator to the second floor, and found our room to be quite large, comfortable and very clean. Our hotel door had only a key lock that was a little difficult to manage. There was no other deadlock or chain, and no peephole to see outside, so you really needed to get the key turned correctly. The bathroom door was right next to the front door, and for some reason it wouldn’t close completely – it would stick in the doorway so you had to pull and pull with all your strength until finally it clicked closed.
Anyway, despite these small annoyances the hotel room was clean, cheap, and it was only for one night, anyway. We left our baggage behind and went out to do some sightseeing.
There is a lot to see in Hamburg. It is really easy to walk around as people obey every traffic signal (unlike in Dublin), there are broad streets with plenty of room to walk, and beautiful architecture around every corner. In the distance there are huge church steeples that make navigation easier even without a map. We especially liked seeing the Rathaus (the city hall building), the canal area (Speicherstadt) which is made up of many old warehouses of red brick separated by water canals, and the Elbphilharmonie building – a very modern amphitheater built on its own island in the Hamburg harbor.
We came to Hamburg for the sights but also for the food, so we stopped at a tasty looking restaurant for beer and snacks. We had a plate of potato pancakes, and I had two big potato dumplings (sprinkled with big chunks of bacon). I picked a beer at random from the menu and ended up with a sweet beer (ick), but the other beer we chose was much better, called Duckstein.
After snacking we continued looking around the city. We saw St. Michael’s church which also had a beautiful interior, and then walked through a city park down to the waterfront and walked along the harbor. Since it was Sunday it seemed like all the locals from the city were walking on the promenade and enjoying the sunny, cool weather. There were people in costumes trying to make some money off the crowds – we even saw a fake Olaf character from Frozen who was a little creepy. Throughout the city we could see an elevated train system, so public transport in Hamburg was quite good. As we walked along the busy promenade we could see out across the harbor to the other side where they had built some buildings to house plays – the Lion King and Mary Poppins each had their own (permanent?) theater. Hamburg is an impressive city for architecture – I kept saying it over and over while we were there. We often saw the symbol of Hamburg, a red flag with a white castle on it flying from buildings, and even on manhole covers. The people of Hamburg are obviously proud of their city.
For dinner we wanted to try a local dish, so we went to a restaurant called Das Kontor (across from the potato pancake restaurant we had been to earlier). I had a fried pork cutlet (with a fried egg on top) and Kuniko had the local dish called Labuskaus. When it arrived it looked like a pile of raw minced pork topped with two fried eggs, but under the eggs is actually pureed sausage and potatoes – everything is cooked. It also had a bowl of fried potatoes on the side. Very good, but also very filling. We had been eating a lot of carbohydrates on this trip so we could only eat about half of Kuniko’s dish. Why did I order French fries on the ferry?
After dinner we walked back to the hotel but also visited a few locations that had impressive architecture. One was St. Nikolai Cathedral, a huge cathedral that had been bombed during World War II. The bulk of the cathedral was missing – only the tall lonely spire remained but it could be seen from just about everywhere in Hamburg. We also saw the interestingly named Chilehaus,
We got back to the hotel, and I was completely stuffed with potatoes, beer, and sausage so I ended up going to bed fairly early. Thanks to indigestion I didn’t sleep soundly and was tossing and turning while trying to fall asleep. Our hotel room had separate twin beds so at least I wasn’t bothering Kuniko.
While drifting in and out of sleep the noise of people talking outside drifted through our open window. Some people down on the street started shouting and I started to think about whether I trusted our hotel door or not. This was a very small, very cheap hotel – what if someone tried to break in? It was silly to think about it, but I was half asleep and full of potatoes and very tired. At some point during the night someone entered the room above us, and I could hear their footsteps as they walked around. Later somebody broke a bottle outside and it was surprisingly loud. What if the friendly hotel guy told his friends outside that there were two easy marks up in room 209? The hotel was called “Terminus” – that had a note of finality, didn’t it? Ridiculous thoughts!
Eventually I got to sleep, but it took a while.
Then, in the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of our door being pushed. I tried to clear my sleepy head, and the sound came again – a deliberate push and a shake of the doorknob. It was dark in the room and I was lying in bed in my underwear and I was not ready to repel a room invasion. But the noise came again even louder, so I sat up and shouted in a big voice: “HEY!” – hoping to scare them off.
But I was really surprised when Kuniko came out of the bathroom and said, “What?”
The noise I was hearing was my poor wife trying to pull the sticky bathroom door closed, and the room invasion I had been imagining was all just in my head. We laughed to the point of tears after that – and at least on my part some of the laughs were out of relief. I’m happy to report that we survived our night in the Terminus Hotel.
