The Rest Of Hamburg Trip

July 20 and 21, 2008

After a brunch at a Pakistani restaurant and waiting out another bout of rain back at the hotel, I decided to head East take a hike around the Outer Alster Lake. I started on the West bank heading North. This part of the path traversed a waterfront park with many strollers. Most people seemed to be going the other direction towards the city centre. I wasn’t sure if this was because more people preferred to walk around the lake in counterclockwise direction or because I had started somewhat later in the afternoon. At the North end of the Alster Lake, the path became neighborhood streets away from the water before returning to the waterfront on the East side but without large greenery separating the footpath from the streets and houses. Here I also found most people walking South towards the city centre but now going the same directions as me thus seemingly invalidating “counterclockwise” hypothesis.

Just before reaching Inner Alster Lake, I took a turn towards Hauptbahnhof and Kunsthalle, None of the Hamburg museums seemed especially noteworthy so my main aim was to get some impressions of the city in its outward appearances such as its architecture. Thus some of the main targets once I was done with the walk around the lake included Chilehaus (a building shaped like an ocean liner), Hafencity (a gigantic construction site) and the future site of the Elbphilharmonie (a supposed Hamburg’s equivalent of Sydney Opera House). Chilehaus was a nice enough looking building, but without a guidebook I probably would have walked right by it without noticing it. Hafencity construction site was interesting merely because of the scale of construction. I realized that I had walked by Elbphilharmonie without seeing it yesterday – thanks to wet conditions. It looked like this building was going to be more reminiscent of Guggenheim Bilbao rather than the Sydney Opera House in look. I had to beg a question, “How big a deal would these building be as more and more like them are built?” An apt comparison from my recent travel experience could be the Cubist buildings of Prague – avant-garde at first but completely unremarkable sans historic reasons today.

Precipitation was minimal after I started my long walk of the day. However, it was cold and windy. Pretty much everyone I saw was wearing windbreakers. It seemed like I was one in a thousand with neither a overcoat of some sort nor an umbrella.

I left the hotel for CCH a little past 11:40 this time around and thus continuing the trend of leaving later and later. I saw no signs of the first set of shows. I had a little bit of the social dancing in between the shows. As for the second set of shows, I decided to take a seat closer (half-way) although I still ended up watching the screen mostly rather than the live performers. After Eddie Torres suggested that the organizers dispense with re-introduction of the performers of the evening, it looked like the social would get kicked off earlier. Oh no. After barely starting the song, Imad stopped the DJ and decided to do the introduction and ensuing clowning after all. I had already a partner picked and asked and everything (and she had to leave early too). Not only that, they followed it up with a competition asking “randomly” picked entrants to copy of move demonstrated by one of the performers. It ended up being quite amusing, but it still went quite long and I had to wonder about losing all steam. I found it all too much standing doing nothing even though I was sitting until the penultimate show - by Eddie Torres and Melissa once again. Fortunately, I was still feeling lively past 4 AM and ended up staying until 4:57 with no immediate end to the party in sight.

The Sunday party was somewhere between Friday and Saturday in many ways. Timba and Son made its return but not quite to the degree seen on Friday. There was more Cha Cha than Saturday but less than Friday. More miscellaneous non-Salsa – not quite sure what to call them but they weren’t completely disastrous because I somehow managed to make something out of dancing to those (in fact they were arguably better than average for the night to some of the best of the evening). There were considerably more dances with less accomplished followers compared to Saturday, but there were a number of dances on par with the best of my Saturday dances. The most consistently good dances were Cha Cha rather than On1 or On2 – once again. I think I could argue that nearly half of my top 10 and top 20 dances all weekend was Cha Cha - or at least a third of the top 10/20.

I had very few dances with people I knew from elsewhere – no more than 3 people including Edie. I think this happened in large part because most of them were stuck in the most crowded corner of the dance hall, which I stayed away for large parts of the evening. The crowding supposedly happened because most of the performer and instructor types were dancing in that corner. As a result, the only big names I saw social dancing all weekend were Mario and Edie – the ones most likely to move out of that pigeonhole. I might add that I would not be able to recognize at least 90% of the performer types out of a line-up.

All in all I probably had more than one dance all weekend with no more than 10 people. I still somehow managed to dance with 2 different people on all three nights – one for 3 Cha Cha altogether (with it getting better and better each night) and another for 8 all weekend (it started with me accidentally continuing on for a third dance in a row because of a song fusing business on Friday leading to her asking me first one Saturday and me asking for a second consecutive one on Saturday and then ending up with 3 more on Sunday). It was a record of sort for Congress setting although it was really no more than a combination of chance, and her seemingly find me nice to dance with and thus dancing with enthusiasm and me finding her pretty good rather than extraordinarily good but nevertheless finding her responses much to my liking. There was another woman I ended up dancing with for probably three songs on two different occasions on Sunday and probably would have tried to dance more with her had I danced with her on Friday or Saturday; I’m not even sure if she was there first two nights. I’m guessing I danced at least 40 dances a night on both Saturday and Sunday and more than 30 on Friday.

In summary I would say that the Hamburg Congress was very good. The calibre of social dancing was near the top. Music was sometimes really good but at times marred by the DJ (with caveat that DJ Dave was the only one sticking out like a sore thumb – with too many Timba/Son in a row on Friday and too many miscues on Saturday and a unique self-promotion to end his set on Sunday) and so-so band. The floor was near the bottom (unevenly slippery thus making carpet preferable for some) although certainly better than concrete floor of Madrid.

After a weekend of touring Hamburg, the striking features to me were the trees and vegetations in general as noted on the first day and the bodies of water seemingly everywhere. Pretty much the only way a city could be so dominated by water as Hamburg is to be a city wholly within a small island or better yet large number of islets (presumably like Venice). Maybe I could add rain to the mix since getting wet seemed difficult to avoid. I believe it went from about raining 50% of the time on Saturday to 20% on Sunday to 90% on Monday. In fact the Monday rains prompted me to give up on some short expeditions before heading off to the airport.

Postscripts. I had brought my camera with me to Hamburg but found that it was not working. I realized that I left my keys at the hotel after arriving home. Upon checking my e-mail, I saw that the hotel management had sent me e-mail about my keys while I was still at the Hamburg Airport. There were five or six hotels in the same building (Dammtorpalais) with two of the hotels making the list on my Lonely Planet Guidebook. Not mine (Hotel Wagner). However, I think it probably was the cheapest. The only complaint was the unpredictable alternate drops in both hot- and cold-water pressure, which they were not able to address when I mentioned it Sunday afternoon (not exactly a big surprise). Returning to a warmer UK made me think of Madrid last year.