No women allowed

Hamburg

Jet lag hadn't seemed to impact us too much so far, but it seemed to finally catch up as we really slept in today! 

As we’d been to Germany a few times before we decided we would skip an organised walking tour for Hamburg and try a self guided tour instead. We had made our way to the impressive Rathaus (town hall) where we noticed the tell-tale umbrellas of a free walking tour group. We decided to tag along for a while to see if it was OK as the tour size was about 20 people, not too big, not too small.

As it turned out the tour guide was quite good so we enjoyed hearing about the history of Hamburg and managed to see a lot of things that we would have inevitably missed if we'd tried to guide ourselves.

The tour ended near the Elbphilharmonie, a modern concert hall, so we took advantage of the free entry to the terrace to look at some views of the city, which weren't that great as they mainly looked out over the docks area.

It was now getting very warm at 34 degrees so we took a short break before heading out to Reeperbahn the party/red light district. The set up was similar to Amsterdam in some ways where women ply their trade from windows you can see from the street, but women aren’t allowed to enter some areas at all.

We went back to the plaza near our hotel for dinner, and struggled again with the number of smokers and the fact that smoking is allowed at restaurants. It really shows how Australia is quite different to Europe in many ways, not always for the best but in this case it definitely is.

One other thing we noticed about Germany was how most people on public transport are still wearing masks, much more compliant than at home.