After the nice cruise I took a nice short flight back to one of my favorite cities, Hamburg! I quickly got back into the swing of things and headed right straight for the Hamburger Kunsthalle, or Hamburg Art Gallery, with paintings by many of the old Rennaissance masters. Ironically outside the museum was a closed off street section for an Ironman bike race. Which is funny, as our last day in London there also happened to be a massive bike competition with tens of thousands of bikers going down the streets. This art museum had a lot of cool artwork, but not nearly as good as the National Gallery in London. It also had a section for “modern art.” Now some art is art, and some art definitely is not art. This ‘modern art gallery’ had no art in it whatsoever, as the displays were just completely random unimaginative objects. Some of the displays included such things as a hammock, an unspectacular section of chain link fence, and a large black circle painted directly on the wall, and a large pile of ash in the middle of the room. Yup.

Next I made my (long way) down a beautiful shopping street I had missed last time, and then took riverside path to the old sailing cargo ship called the “Rickmer Rickmers”, built in 1896. Here is a brief overview of the ship:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickmer_Rickmers

It was neat walking around deck, and going into the hold which had many old artifacts from the ship.

A miniature giant wonderland. That was my next and last stop of the day. There is a museum called Miniatur Wunderland (I’ll let you translate). Inside, situated on the second and third floor of this canal-side museum is huge collection of  miniature scenes of cities and natural environments. The sections include settings from Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Las Vegas, an American old west town (complete with animated street duel), the Vatican, A Nordic area and more! I wasn’t expecting much but it turned out to be much cooler than I thought. Much of it was animated, with moving parts, and buttons you could push to make things happen. You go through earthen tunnels and even see mini underground mining scenes. Every 5-10 minutes or so the lights would dim, and all the lights in the buildings would turn on, and it almost looked like real night time environment scenes. It’s hard to describe, so of course I’ll have pictures at the bottom. The stats in the pamphlet: 1,040 trains – with over 10 miles of track! 385,000 lights, 260,000 figures, and 130,000 trees. And they have significant additions to the museum planned! But the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, was in the museum restaurant there was an unlimited and free soda machine! 7up, Pepsi, and some other colas I had never heard of before. It was quite refreshing as it was such a hot day!

And then I made my way back to the hotel.