Travel Blog

Blog posts for today and tomorrow will be a little slimmer, since the trek from Copenhagen to Prague is a total of 487 miles (by car).

We decided to break up the journey a bit, and made our way to Hamburg, Germany for the evening. I thought we were going back to Hamburg the same route we’d gone when heading out to Ribe, so I was quite surprised when it turned out our train car would be taking a ferry for a good portion of the trip!

Here I have to give a nod to the French folks. I’ve (yet) to see why Americans have perpetuated stereotypes about the French being less helpful than anyone else. As a matter of fact, a Frenchman on this train from Denmark to Germany helped us understand what was going on with the ferry, including that ALL train passengers were required to disembark while leaving our luggage behind. I’d understood the latter part from what I pieced together from the instructions over the loudspeaker, but couldn’t wrap my head around what that had to do with a ferry!

Here are photos from the ferry (below our deck are two decks of parked cars, then a third deck containing our train car):

At the Hamburg station there was a photo booth, which our guy got a kick out of using:

Then we dropped our bags off at the hotel:

…and went looking for traditional German food. We found a place right down the street. Service was interesting…as in, we waited close to a half hour before the waitress remembered we were there and took our order. But we had nowhere in particular to be, and it turned out the food was good.

I had the wild boar, Marc had mixed meats, our girl had traditional Wiener schnitzel (with veal), and our boy had venison.

These were my and Marc’s dishes:

Then us girls went to visit the Hachez Chocolate Museum.

Here is what we saw along our walk:

(The photo of the hamburger sign was taken because there’s a running argument between the kids about whether hamburgers originated in Hamburg. That being said, it was our girl’s idea to bring back burgers from Burger King, just so the boys could say they ate hamburgers in Hamburg. Lol!)

The chocolate museum tour made for an interesting observation of a culture shift from what we’d experienced in the other countries we visited so far.

In France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, tour guides we encountered either presented their information in their native tongue plus English, assumed everyone spoke at least English and presented only in that language, or asked the group to find out which major language(s) would be needed so they could include as many people as possible.

That was handled very differently at the chocolate museum in Germany. There, the 90 minute tour was conducted 99% in German, with fully a quarter of the people in the room fluent in English and not German. This wasn’t because our guide wasn’t fluent in English, because she clearly was. The other English speakers besides my girl and myself appeared to be British and possibly Greek. Before the tour, the English speakers were handed a flimsy guidebook that we were apologetically told by the girl at the ticket desk required a deposit of 2.5 euros. And I guess they sometimes do English language tours; she seemed hesitant about our taking the German tour, which I didn’t understand until after we’d gone through it!

The guidebook was supposed to be exactly what was being verbalized in German, but clearly wasn’t as the information didn’t match what we saw in the rooms we were brought through. The worst part, though, was when the guide would completely ignore my girl when handing out the different stages of chocolate for tasting. I had to keep nudging her to insist on being included, which no German speaking person had to do. Our experience on the trains bound to/from/within Germany were very similar in terms of language – information was given by the engineer in German only or *maybe* German plus a condensed English version. Hence our friendly Frenchman helping us understand about the train ferry!

Here are photos from the chocolate museum:

Germans apparently feel very differently from Belgians about whether white chocolate should be considered “chocolate”. When we toured the chocolate factory in Belgium, the chocolatier there was quite passionate about the matter, saying that it IS chocolate because it contains cocoa butter. Germans, however, say it isn’t:

I found it rather amusing that the founder of this particular German chocolate company was a Belgian with a French name…they tried brushing this off by saying his name may sound French, but he was German. Even more entertaining was their rationale for his spelling of the word chocolate:

Here are the dark chocolate bars my girl and I decorated. Mine had rosa pepper, coffee bean, cinnamon, and salt. Hers had coconut, chili powder, and cinnamon.

Then we headed back to the hotel, with some excitement on the way back. Besides loads of “very interesting people” (our kids’ new term), we encountered a guy openly peeing on the street, without bothering to do it near the buildings as you might see in San Francisco.

More exciting though were the multiple police cars that went screaming by in the roundabout, and of course stopped up the street in the direction we were going. I looked around and saw there was a decent sized group of people just ahead of us, also going that way, so we sped up and mingled with them. As we approached, I could see at least two men in the car, passenger window down, and easily 9 officers surrounding the car with hands on the butt of their revolvers. Needless to say, I gently nudged my girl and told her to move quickly past!

All in all, Hamburg was an experience I’m glad we had. Our limited time in Germany may not be entirely indicative of German culture, but it didn’t make me sad we had such a short time here. On to Prague!!