A weekend with the Hamburgers

This past weekend I took my first domestic trip in Germany to the lovely city of Hamburg.  Hamburg is the second largest city in Germany and about 300km from Berlin.  Basically it was a really pretty, clean port town.  It reminded me of Seattle in a lot of ways.  Apparently the weather is very similar as well. 

Also, I took a sort of unorthodox way to get to Hamburg.  I used what is quite popular in Germany and quite foreign to Americans, but the legalized internet version of hitchhiking.  It worked out fine in the end.  The lady that drove was very nice and there were two other strangers in the car with us.  They were both unfriendly and in no way interested in talking to me despite the one reading a book in English.  So I basically sat quietly in the back seat for 3 hours.  The only real commotion was when I tried to ask the driver where we were being dropped off and that led to a complete communication meltdown because I had NO idea what she was trying to say to me.

Otherwise in Hamburg, there isn't a great deal to report on.  It's beautiful at night, since so much of it is on or near the water.  Saturday night my friend who lives there coordinated for a group of us to go to some club at the Rathaus.  The Rathouse is basically their city hall and there is a HUGE club inside this beautiful building on Saturday nights.  I can't remember what it was called though.  As usual, I forgot to take my camera with me most of the time I went out, so the trip was not well documented.

The top picture is where the club was Saturday night.

p.s. because I'm very curious about everything and think being called a hamburger is funny, I looked it up on wikipedia.  There is no good story about why we call hamburgers hamburgers, just some blah blah about how a primitive form of it originated int he hamburg region.