Memories and hints of a travelling IT professional.
The St. Pauli-Landungsbrücken at Hamburg, Germany, are an ancient pier for passenger ships dating back to the year 1839. These ships were by that time powered by coal and it was, therefore, wanted to keep a distance between the ships and the harbour buildings to prevent fire. The pier is 688 meters long and from here big ships went on long journeys – a place that must have seen many tears of joy and sorrow.
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The Hamburger Kunsthalle is a fantastic art museum close to the railway station of Hamburg, Germany. It consists of three buildings dating back to 1868, 1921 and 1996 and also the art shown here covers a long time period from the Middle Ages to modern and contemporary art. The collection is presented on 13,000 square meters throughout the interconnected buildings and you can walk there for hours enjoying fine art.
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Hagenbecks Tierpark at Hamburg, Germany, is a well-known zoological garden. In fact, it consists of two things that can be visited separately: the tropical aquarium and the zoological garden. In 1907 it was the first zoo without fences, but its roots go back to 1848 when a member of the Hagenbeck family started to exhibit six seals in the city centre. Today you can see more than 1,800 animals of 200 species in the zoo and 14,000 animals from 300 species inside the aquarium.
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You can’t get to Hamburg, Germany, without learning something about seafaring. It is a necessity like eating fresh fish or visiting the Reeperbahn. A very good place for this is the Internationales Maritimes Museum (IMMH) located in an old storage building at the Speicherstadt. It was opened in 2008 and exhibits on nine floors nearly everything about people crossing the sea on a boat. This includes 50,000 miniature boats, numerous paintings about seafaring and special things I never heard about before like ship models made from bones.
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The Elbphilharmonie is a giant concert hall at the Speicherstadt of Hamburg, Germany, and the city’s newest gem. It fits well into the location by combining the existing foundations of a former storage building with a new glass front on top. It was inaugurated in 2017 and has already become a new icon of the city. In addition to the concert locations, you can also find restaurants, a hotel and a coffee bar inside the building.
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The town hall of Hamburg, Germany, is an absolute beauty. It is located near the Jungfernstieg and the Binnenalster and shows the extreme richness of the city in the past. It was built between 1886 and 1897 in the Renaissance revival style. The 112 meters high tower is an icon of the city. You can walk around inside and outside the building for a very long time and always discover something new as the building is very rich in decorations.
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The Große Freiheit (lit. ‘large freedom‘) is a side street of the Reeperbahn at Hamburg, Germany. It goes back to the 17th century when a special economic zone (the ‘Freiheit‘) was created here – giving the inhabitants freedom concerning crafts and religion. But the street became much more famous later when being part of the red-light zone with striptease clubs named Safari, Colibri or Salambo. Later it became a place for music; the Beatles played their first concerts at the Star-Club.
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The hotel Egon is nothing really special – just a clean and good hotel in Hamburg, Germany. It is one of these places that you would book because of its location at the end of the Reeperbahn – the party zone of the city with a lot of hustle and bustle at night. I want to a concert at the Große Freiheit and for that, the hotel was perfect because of the very short way to bed.
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When you arrive at the main railway station of Kassel, Germany (not to be confused with Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe) and leave the main building you might wonder that there is a large unused space in front of it. The answer is hard to find and located under ground: from 1941 to 1943 the railway company of the Deutsches Reich (the Reichsbahn) invested a lot of money to create an underground air-raid shelter in front of the station. It was supposed to protect travellers that arrive at Kassel during an attack.
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In the past, I had visited the Zoologischer Garten of Berlin, Germany, multiple times but I never went to the other zoo of the German capital, the Tierpark Berlin. Maybe it was because it is located in the East of Berlin which I didn’t really visit yet and which still has interesting places left for me to discover. I didn’t expect to much when going there but I could have known that I’m wrong with just finding out that the Tierpark with its 160 hectares is as large as the island of Helgoland. It is the biggest of its kind in Europe.
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