Days 9-13: Northern Germany: Warm Showers and Hanseatic Powers

LÜNEBURG, GERMANY - Greetings from Niedersachsen!  I'm writing from the charming home of Doertje and Martin, the walls lined with gorgeous large-format photographs from their cycling adventures in Canada and New Zealand – they are the third set of hosts we have found (in five days) through Warm Showers, a website/online community set up specifically to connect touring cyclists.  We knew it was a good idea, but I don't think we were prepared for how incredibly hospitable folks would be, and how much it would open up and expand our experience of the places we visit.  Each stay so far has turned out to be a real blessing.  More on that in a bit...

Thursday 2/10 and Friday 3/10 – Travemünde to Aumühle via Lübeck and Mölln

 Saturday 4/10 through Monday 6/10 - to Hamburg, then Lüneburg via Vierhöfen

We've been in Germany for five days now.  See our approximate route above.  We haven't been riding a whole lot – just around 185 "Ks" over five days – as we've been equally focused on sight-seeing and exploring – although there hasn't been a day completely without cycling either.  And we've certainly been having adventures.  It was quite an adventure just getting here!  First (way back on Wednesday evening) we took the train from Copenhagen to Malmö (much easier to take bikes here than the train from STHLM to GBG, though we had to buy tickets for the bikes.)  This is what greeted us upon our triumphant return to Sweden:

some views of Malmö:

HONK Skåne-style?

Very nice to be back in Sweden.  I quite liked Malmö, even though we only had a few short hours there.  We did a little kamikaze-style cycle-sightsee around town in the dusk and rain, had some surprisingly lavish Thai food in the multi-ethnic area a little south of the center and breezed through People's Park (the vibe was somewhere in between Christiania and Liseberg.)  And then we made our way to the North Harbor to catch the ferry, traversing some big confusing industrial areas that would have been virtually impassible in the US – here, there were cycle lanes virtually the entire way.  Hooray for Sweden!

we saw this imposing tower from a distance and then ended up cycling right by it.

in the waiting room, getting ready to board.  we felt a bit out of place as the only cyclists on this trip, though apparently there are often many more (in the summer at least.)  most of the passengers were truck drivers

Ferdy and Esmé in the cargo bay

this was in our cabin, in place of a porthole I guess

Malmö by moonlight

having fun with my new camera

sleeping trucks

Elsa, composing the previous blog entry, while I read Buddenbrooks in preparation for our arrival at Lübeck.  This was before the on-board sauna and jacuzzi, and catching a bit of Terminator on TV

arrival at Travemünde

following the trucks off the boat

sleepy seaside Travemünde, waking up

our first German breakfast (yum! cheap!) and final view of the sea for quite some time

a sign that things might not go so well in Germany

(this was on the sporting goods store where Elsa purchased a thermos, at long last)

(this bike may be puky, but at least it's happy about it!)

Lübeck is utterly charming

our lunch spot, overlooking the Trave

homestyle smørrebrød.  practicing my "food-porn" mode.  are you enticed?

After lunch, and a bit of church-going (see previous post), we were making our way toward our first Warm Showers stay, a little outside of the Lübeck's historic center, when I heard an excited voice behind me: "hey, are you the guys from America?!"  It was Christian and Sharon, our unbelievably warm, generous, fun-loving hosts, who seemed to scoop us up right at that moment and carry us on custom-made joy-ride for nearly the next twenty-four hours.  Here they are:

Christian is from Lübeck originally, Sharon is Filipina; they are a baker and a kindergarten teacher, respectively; they met in Sydney – Christian lived in Australia for seventeen years (as well as living seemingly everywhere else in the world, including Asheville NC) – but they are here now living in a very sweet apartment above Christian's parents' house (both of his siblings live on the same street as well.)  They hosted us there, bountifully, in a room featuring, among other things, an amazing rotating circular sofa, maybe 6 feet in diameter, with adjustable backing sections and a pile of pillows that could accommodate probably four adults or more children – with leather upholstery by BMW.  Pretty fantastic; I'm sorry I didn't get a photo of it.  Here they are again, without sunglasses and with a funny face:

Sharon and Christian led us on a rapid-fire tour around some Lübeck highlights, including the astonishing St-Marien church, a medieval-era hospice building (now used as a holiday craft market), and the Buddenbrooks house-museum, which was exciting to see as I'm currently reading the book.  (The museum was a bit disappointing – it's more of a museum than a historically preserved house, and mostly in German – though the two furnished rooms are cool, and how often do you get to be inside the actual setting of the book you're reading?)

they also led us down some neat old alleyways, once poor/immigrant quarters, now in-demand real estate:

and to the oldest brewery in town, serving some curious, tasty, extra-fermenty beer without sulfites (and where they insisted on paying for almost all of our meal and beer):

and also to the Neideregger marzipan shop, where there are almond-sugar versions of numerous local and international landmarks

the next morning, after a mini language lesson and many delightful discussions about contemporary politics, cultural differences, the national shame surrounding the holocaust, and many bike-touring and wild-camping tips, they accompanied us to the Elbe-Lübeck canal cycle path

which led us on our dusty way – not exactly a direct route, but it was easy to follow at least (for the time being.)   along the way we met a couple of twelve-year-old girls from Lübeck were off on their own little weekend trip to Mölln (30 km away), where they would stay at a hostel and "look around." pretty impressive on the part of both the girls and their parents.

Mölln is the supposed death-place (apparently Rudolf Steiner had much to say on the subject) of the folkloric trickster-figure Till Eulenspiegel, who is well memorialized in sculpture throughout the town:

in the main square, he looks quizzically over at George Bernard Shaw, who was apparently an "honorary citizen" (didn't get the story there.)

a fill from Till

we didn't go to his museum, but it's a nice example of the town's super-quaint architecture

many restaurants (and every supermarket) were closed for German Unity Day, but we stumbled on a crowd of Turkish-Germans grilling up their version of Hamburgers on a side-street.  We ended up chatting for quite a while with a fellow whose parents had emigrated from Izmir, who was excited to introduce us to his Chilean-German wife – led to a very nice tri-lingual conversation.

yum!

The canal bike-path (and stopping in Mölln) took us a fair distance away from our intended goal of Hamburg, where (after striking out on warmshowers and hostelworld, and trying about 15 different hotels) we had a few pending AirBnB requests and one seemingly legit hotel room booking.  We considered taking a train in, but after getting internet in Schwarzenbek and determining that we wouldn't, in fact, be losing a few hundred dollars by not getting to Hamburg, we decided to just bike as far as we could and find a place to camp, which (after a lovely dusk ride through some farmlands and a distressingly bumpy path through the woods alongside a railway – Elsa swore she heard a boar) turned out to be just outside the town of Aumühle.

In the morning we came across this delightful little market in Glinde:

sighted en route to Hamburg: after a curious dearth of leafy cooking greens in Scandinavia, it appears that the Germans get it.  We later learned, however, that they don't pick the kale here until after the first frost, when the starches break down a bit and it is sweeter (then they cook it with lots of animal fat and tromp through the snow to eat it with, of course, along with lots of beer and meat.)  Which is why this lush-looking bounty is so untouched.  So maybe they have some things still to discover.

Prizeotel Hamburg: a budget option for those who want a bathroom that looks like a 1990s drum'n'bass album cover.  (we didn't stay here, but they graciously let us use their internet, and computers, and printer, for about an hour)

Many of my photos from Hamburg didn't get saved because, apparently, the memory card wasn't pushed in all the way.  But that's okay, there wasn't too much to see.  We got some pretty delicious and cheap ice cream, landed at a hostel, took a pretty and fighty walk along the river/harbor and generally had a confusing time trying to navigate our way around Hamburg.  It's a neat city with a lot going on and a great diversity in architecture and aesthetics.  (Christian scoffed when we told him we were planning to go there – and you can see why somebody from Lübeck would write it off as "ugly," but there's a lot of appealing stuff mixed in with the big-city garishness.  The expansive city park seemed especially nice, though we didn't get to fully explore it.)  We didn't get too far outside of the center, unfortunately, so we missed out on most of the more personable neighborhoods, – like, for instance, the one where my dad lived as a student in the '70s – but we did have a very cozy, tapas-flavored dinner in Altona (a former Danish town, close to our hospital), which felt like a liveable area.

The downtown, or at least the tourist-y places, was fairly overrun with tourists – despite being low season, it was a holiday weekend – and we got a bit swept up in the action too, taking in Dialog Im Dunkel (a curious kind of conceptual-art-cum-social-experiment-as-tourist-attraction: you spend 90 minutes in totally darkness, being led by a visually-impaired guide through a variety of situations – forest, marketplace, city street, bar, etc.  It was pretty cool and definitely a unique experience, although the physical spaces were – as I'm sure a blind person could tell far more readily than me – pretty palpably mediocre, theme-park style sets.)  We also took a bilingual ferry tour of the harbor and industrial port (one of the largest in the world), which was interesting albeit overpriced – also most of my pictures from it got lost... here are some from the tail end, after I discovered the memory card issue

the new (still under construction) symphony hall

taking the old Elbe tunnel out of town 

sunset/moonrise grazing in Wuhlenburg, where the Seeve meets the Elbe

kind of the most picturesque little stream imaginable

after a pleasant evening ride through industry and suburbs and riverside and farmland, we arrive at our home for the evening: the unimaginably lovely and welcoming converted farm homestead of the wool-spinning, wood-oven-bread-baking, ukulele-playing, sci-fi/fantasy-loving, role-playing and board-gaming, community-oriented family of Michaela, Hanno, and their delightful daughters Iljana (11) and Nina (9), who pushed their bedtime to chat (in astonishingly good English) about school, birthdays, cats, musical instruments and Halloween (only recently celebrated in Germany – within the last ten years – and only in certain places.)

this is their living room (notice the nifty two-level floor situation.  also, count the spinning wheels!):

and kitchen:

Even though we barely left the house, our stay with the Klomps was probably one of the highlights of the trip so far; Michaela and Hanno (and the girls!) were just so great to talk to, and so inspiring in their approach to life.  Plus it just felt like home to be with them, probably because they would fit right in as West Philly homesteaders.

In the morning, we compared notes with Michaela about the German and American education, health care and social welfare systems (many of the same problems exist in both countries – they just seem to be about ten steps further along than we are) over fresh-baked banana bread and homemade quince jam, to a soundtrack of Tori Amos and Amanda Palmer.  Before sending us on our way, she showed off her snail-proof lettuce trough (a rigged-up gutter hung from an arbor) and game cupboard (to investigate: Smallworld, Mice and Mystics, Frag.)  To Michaela and family, if you're reading this: thank you again for welcoming us into your home, and we hope we can return the favor some day!

elsa doing some pre-departure research, with help from a snuffy-like friend

Yesterday was a designated and much deserved rest day.  We cycled 15 short Ks into Lüneburg, had a nourishing vegan lunch (quinoa and veggies) and some coffee treats with Martin and Doertje, and then headed off to the Salu Salztherme baths for several hours of lounging in sundry saunas (including the amazing eucalyptus room and rose-tepidarium) and salinated pools (this town made its wealth from salt, though it seems to sustain it through tourism) before a very German dinner of potato, meat, salad and "fjordlachs."

Doertje demonstrating her caramel latte macchiato technique

And now we are off, to cycle (and finally, actually, camp!) for several days along the Elbe.  Hopefully we make Potsdam by Friday, and not sure how much internet we'll have between now and then, if any.