Memories and hints of a travelling IT professional.
The Cyclassics in Hamburg are one of Germany’s best-known road-cycling events, combining a WorldTour professional race with mass-participation rides through the city and its surrounding region. The race began in 1996, quickly gained prestige, and has since become a major fixture in Hamburg’s sporting calendar.
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Dittsche – Das wirklich wahre Leben is a German comedy series centred on an unemployed Hamburg man who regularly visits a local snack bar. Wearing a dressing gown, jogging bottoms and bathing sandals, Dittsche exchanges empty beer bottles for full ones and then launches into elaborate theories about politics, sport, science and everyday life. His arguments are based on what the programme humorously presents as dangerously incomplete ‘half-knowledge’, making him both exasperating and oddly endearing.
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Planten un Blomen is a large public park in the heart of Hamburg, extending across roughly 47 hectares between the city centre, the exhibition grounds and St. Pauli. It is far more than an ordinary urban green space: visitors find landscaped gardens, ponds, lawns, fountains, mature trees and quiet paths, all within easy walking distance of Hamburg’s main shopping streets and transport connections. The park is often regarded as one of the city’s greenest and most attractive public spaces.
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The Hamburger Michel is the affectionate name for Hamburg’s principal church, St. Michaelis, a magnificent Baroque building near the harbour. Its striking copper-covered tower rises 132 metres above the Neustadt district, making the church one of the first landmarks visitors notice when approaching the city centre. With its bright white interior, spacious nave and imposing clock, the Michel is among the most recognisable buildings in northern Germany.
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The Bucerius Kunst Forum is a compact international exhibition centre in the heart of Hamburg, situated at Alter Wall opposite the Rathaus courtyard. Rather than maintaining a permanent collection, it presents around four carefully curated exhibitions each year, bringing together works from museums and private collections around a particular artist, theme or period. Its purpose is to place familiar works in fresh contexts and to reveal connections between different eras and artistic disciplines.
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Krebeck, in the Samtgemeinde Gieboldehausen in the Göttingen district of Niedersachsen, is marked as the geodetic centre of Germany. In the village, a prominent stone with an information plaque commemorates the site, although the calculated point itself lies in the Struth woodland, roughly one kilometre north-west of the village centre, at 51°35′26″N, 10°06′22″E. The memorial was installed after German reunification and was inaugurated in 1991, with Bundestagspräsidentin Rita Süssmuth reported to have attended.
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The Velorace in Dresden is a city-centre cycling event that has been held since 2013 and has become a fixed part of the national racing calendar. It grew out of the wider Saxon cycling tradition and has steadily developed into one of the best-known mass-participation races in eastern Germany.
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The Dresdner Parkeisenbahn is a charming miniature railway running through the Großer Garten, Dresden’s large historic park. Its origins date back to June 1st, 1950, when a temporary children’s railway was opened between the Zoo and what is now Straßburger Platz. Although it was initially intended to operate for only one season, its popularity led to a permanent service; the line was extended in 1951 and reached its present circular route of approximately 5.6 kilometres.
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The Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden was founded in 1912 on the initiative of Karl August Lingner, a local industrialist and manufacturer of the mouthwash Odol. Its purpose was to make scientific knowledge about the human body, personal health and preventive medicine accessible to ordinary people. The present building, designed by Wilhelm Kreis in a monumental yet modern style, was completed for the Second International Hygiene Exhibition in 1930. It was badly damaged during the bombing of Dresden in 1945 and later rebuilt; after German reunification, the museum was fundamentally reoriented as a museum about human experience.
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The Verkehrsmuseum in Dresden is one of the city’s most distinctive museums, housed in the historic Johanneum by the Neumarkt. Its roots go back to 1877, when the collection that later became the Saxon Railway Museum first began, while the museum itself was founded in 1952 and opened to the public in its present setting in the 1950s.
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