Day 13

I could have gone to see The Lion King. In German. And I decided not to. I'm a little disappointed. Oh well. 

The tickets would have been really expensive though so I guess that is a bright side, I can use it on something else. Instead I just walked around the city with a group of people. We found a hooka bar, here they call it Shiha, which I am not a fan of but it was enjoyable to just sit there and people watch. We were in the red light district so it was quite interesting. 

We eventually found a little café that sold both ice cream and alcohol and we sat in the back and played cards. We then walked back towards the ship and just sat on the dock for a while. We got back to the ship at about 11:30 and I packed.

See, now I bet your disappointed in me for not going to The Lion King. What I did was not better. 

Interesting story: Because we were in the red light district here were sex stores every five feet and in one of them it looked like they were having some sort of cocktail party. At least, they were all standing around holding glasses of champagne while looking at the weird painting on the walls. Do people go there for fun? It was interesting. 

In the morning I had a three hour walking tour of the city. Our tour guide was this little cute woman who liked to say "Let's go further" whenever we needed to keep walking. Apparently Hamburg also floods because we heard a lot about flood gates and certain buildings that people couldn't live in because if it floods they would get wet. 

We went to this one really cool building that was basically an advertisement for the new Opera house they are building. It was just a giant black square but there were horn shapes coming out of the side at regular intervals and you could stick your ear right up next to one and get a sample of music.

THIS REMINDS ME! We saw the COOLEST elevator. She took us into some office building just to show us it, there are only 6 left in the whole city. It was wooden, with two sides, one going up and one going down. There were't any doors, just cubby holes at regular intervals and you would just jump, or step into the side of which direction you wanted to go. The cool thing was that it was a continuous loop, so you could get in one side and ride it all the way up or down and end up where you started. It was so neat, we all took turns riding it. The poor people in the office building. 

We also stopped at a little café in another office building where they had ice cream but no wifi! Wifi was crazy hard to find, which was unexpected. In Russia, you could find wifi SO easily, it was in basically every restaurant or shop. Here, they had it but it was all password locked and not very fast. So frustrating. Hopefully our hotel in Munich has it, or I will be sad. 

We eventually got the the Miniature Wunderland, which was SO COOL. Seriously, going to a model train set does not sound like the most exciting thing in the world but trust me, it was mind blowing. It was three floors, with a bunch of different countries represented. They even had an airport where the planes actually took off and landed. What. How. So cool. 

The detail was amazing, the little people where not just stuck there, they were actually frozen in motion. I saw multiple car accidents, a guy that was dead in a river and the police were pulling him out of it. There was a huge music festival with hundreds of attendants all crowded around the stage. There were traffic jams and fires and people shopping and little jokes like cows SCUBA diving. Things were in motion and things would light up; every 15 minutes it would go from day to night for a while, which was incredible. You could stand there for hours and just look at all the details. I took an obsessive amount of photos. I do not regret going there at all, it was awesome. 

The rest of the day I spent tanning on the ship since the timing was off to go anywhere else. It was nice, and it was in Germany, which made it awesome. There is very few people on the ship when we are in port, mostly just those who are forced to be there via dock time. Which is a way they discipline us. A few people were there because they were in the drunk tank in Russia. We kept getting asked if that is why we were there. 

Tomorrow I leave for Munich bright and early. I have no idea what is there except that it is where Oktoberfest is and we are going to be going to the top of a mountain. I'm excited, I like going out of the port cities, and Hamburg didn't thrill me. 

To Munich!