I had seen Miniatur Wunderland in a documentary online before. It's close to the most German thing you can image. A old shipping warehouse on the docks with three stories of model trains and landscapes in amazing detail.

There were different scenes in each area (we saw Mittel Deutschland, Italy, US, Switzerland, Hamburg, Flughafen Hamburg, and Scandinavia).

You could probably spend all day looking at one scene and not find everything. Look in the woods and you'd see two model people doing it. Watch the cars drive around the road for a while and you'll see an accident with smoke, that police cars and and ambulance rush over to. The airport was a full model of the Hamburg airport with the actual flight schedules, and planes that took off, landed and taxiied to the terminal. I've never seen anything like it.


The said sexers
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I nerded out over the model ICE 3 trains

And here is a floof bahn for (e:robert).


Bro-butt








The american scene was mostly trucks on highways in the desert (they modeled Los Vegas)


Hamburg itself

We spent about 5 hours in the whole museum and didn't even see everything.

Olmsted you ain't got shit.

" >(MAP TO: )

This volkspark was had more manicured parts then Flensburg, it even had a botanical garden.

It still had miles and miles of paths through forests. You could walk for miles in a forest in the middle of a city, right on an S-Bahn line. I wonder if anyone ever camps in it. And if you look on the map only 10 minutes away in one direction were farms.

Some pictures from walking around the Hamburg Landungsbrucke and altstadt. The Landungsbrucke is like canalside times a million with more actual shipping traffic.





We also saw the Hamburg city hall, which was ridiculously big. It looks it was built in the same style as the city hall we saw a month before in Philly. I wonder if they were trying to copy the Hamburg one.


A fountain in the middle of the city hall had this statue of a lady stomping on a dragon.











The city is so capitalistic even the churches have stores and restaurants attached.

After walking around we went to some of the gay bars around the Hauptbahnhof. They were mostly terrible and smoky, but at one we ended up chatting with a old-time Hamburger who gave us some recommendations.

After Flensburg it was back to Hamburg. We took the regional express back, through Tarp (Yvonne's town), and Neumuenster.


On the way there I managed to book another AirBnb there (no we don't plan ahead for anything). It was in a neighborhood called Altona on the west side of Hamburg.

We stayed on this street called Gaußstraße, right across from this crusty punk encampment of trailers. " >(MAP TO: )
When we got there, there was a girl with a pack of like 9 dogs following her out of the alley it was in.

(e:paul) was having a small-time meltdown when we got there. I think he was stressed out by big city life after being in Flensburg. So we walked around to get some food, and ended up at this amazing Vietnamese place called Green Papaya.

On the same street (e:paul) got pulled into some film project where he sat in a taxi and answered questions about religion, music and politics. I'm glad I didn't get picked because I wouldn't have been able to answer fast enough.

I'm going to end my posting drought because he's letting me post his vacation pictures. I barely took any!