Hamburg Part 1

Hamburg

Hamburg is not on your usual tourist route but it happened to be en route to one our most important destinations: Legoland! Not only that, but we had also discovered Hamburg is home to the the largest model railway museum in the world. Now in Australia we have some big stuff: big sheep, big worm, big potato, big prawn, big banana, big beer can etc, etc, but I think it's safe to say that the Miniature Wonderland holds one's attention a bit longer than the big beer can.

We arrived in the afternoon after a pleasant trip through the German countryside. Then we got off at Hamburg Hauptbahnhof with none of the dramas we had in Berlin. Our hotel we had booked was a 10 min walk away and it all seemed to be going very smoothly till we started walking past all the seedy XXX places. The hotel didn't mention on its website that it was in the red light district! Ben started asking why there were lots of pictures of women with no clothes on.

Hmmm quite.

Thankfully Finley didn't see anything.

So we had the afternoon for ourselves and we went to the old town which like so many places in Europe really is very beautiful. Evidence that the German do indeed have a sense of humour was the presence of a fully size pirate ship pub in one of the squares. We bought some chips instead. We also were foolish enough to walk past a Lego shop. Being Sunday it wasn't open, but we were in Hamburg for 2 days so there was no escaping a return the following day.

The big day came and we were out the door by 8.30 walking down to the beautiful dock area of Hamburg to where Miniature Wonderland was waiting.

 

The Docks!

As we approached the old warehouse that the Wonderland is in I got a bit of an excited tingle all over. The public statement is that this visit was entirely for the kids but let's be honest I couldn't care if I had to drag Ben, Finley, Maja and Delia kicking and screaming. Luckily such tactics were not necessarily. Even Delia was getting excited as we got closer.

 

And we were in.

Can't remember how much we paid but it was worth it. 3 levels and 3 continents of model train heaven. We got to press little buttons (Finley was particularly keen on this) so little figures would run around loading trucks, or hot air balloons going up, or buses driving through towns or a chocolate factory that actually wrapped a piece of chocolate and dropped it into your hand. Fantastic. There was even an airport with planes taking off and landing every couple of minutes as well as the occasional fire on a plane and all the fire engines rushing out to put out the fire,. The trains are able to go from one end of the warehouse to the other over 3 levels and 6 metres of height. There was also a fully functioning port with locks opening and closing. We even visited the computer control room which looked more sophisticated than the Melbourne train system which I'm sure is a bunch of wooden blocks placed on a map with big sticks moving them around.

Amazing amazing amazing.

She can't help it, Delia's fascinated

We spent over 3 hours there and let's face it we're going to have to build a model train set when we get home, but something on a more modest scale. Miniature Wonderland is over 10 times the size of our house!

We were pretty exhausted after that and headed back to the lovely town square for lunch and the obligatory visit to the Lego shop. Well, let's be honest I wanted to buy the technical Lego for myself but somehow we got out of the shop just buying a few mini figures with the excuse that we told the kids we would buy stuff in Legoland which we were going to the very next day.

Mistake. When it comes to Germany Lego is cheap, in fact about 40% cheaper than Denmark. Darn.

We eventually got back to our hotel via some back streets and avoided the more eye popping shop fronts. We found an Italian restaurant (the kids are closet Italians: pasta, pizza and gelati are the preferred cuisine) and within a couple of minutes we had met a chap who sounded English but was in fact German. He was 80 years old and had lived in London for 5 years and then Australia for 5 years in the 1950s and 60s. Charming guy but very lonely as his wife died a couple of years ago and he has no more family. He ended up sitting with us for dinner and took us on a walk afterwards to the local lake (we had no idea) which was simply lovely. He then walked us back to our hotel (he walks 8kms every day!) and we went to bed.

Then next day we were off to Legoland, I couldn't wait! Oh yes, the kids couldn't wait too.