Hamburg was another one of those cities which was just kinda on the way, which I learned while here was the case for a lot of people. It however did also have the benefit of having the world's largest miniature train set, which I really wanted to see. Other than that I had no clue what was even here.

The hostel was pretty good, though in a rather residential area so they were quite strict about noise. After checking in I met an Aussie guy almost straight away and after sorting out my bed I went downstairs to have a few drinks. The hostel had a basement where you could sit and drink and pretty much make as much noise as you wanted. We sat around here a bit, along with a few other Aussies, a Yank and a couple of Norwegian girls and then headed into town.

Hamburg has two famous streets. One is the Reeperbahn which is a main stretch of what is Europe's largest red light district. The other is Herbertstrasse which is the small street of the red light district which has the women in the windows (like in Amsterdam) and is closed to women. Our destination was one of the streets off Reeperbahn which had a bunch of pubs and clubs, the first being the 99c bar, which as you can probably guess had every drink for just 99c. It actually kinda sucked.

After this we went to a karaoke bar where we learned something. What we learned was that karaoke is Germany (well at least Hamburg) isn't for drunken idiots wanting to make a fool of themselves. No it's for people who can actually sing. These people should have been on bloody German Idol or Germany's Got Talent or some s*** like that, not at a karaoke bar. Some of their covers were almost better than the originals I thought.

The next day I went to the Miniature Wunderland to check out the trains. The place took a little bit of finding, but it was well worth it. I spent about 2 hours in there (which according to Dad meant I must have missed half of it. Not sure what they were doing in there… I looked at it all and pressed most of the buttons to make things happen). My favourite part was the airport. The amount of detail in it was insane. Planes took off and landed and got taxied to and from the runway. Stair cars pulled up alongside planes not at terminals and busses came by to pick up passengers. It wasn't just a bunch of things in loop, it was a fully functioning airport.

You could even look at the control desk of the whole thing. Computers and monitors everywhere controlling every little aspect of the whole thing. It's quite mind bogglingly complex. There was even a day/night cycle where all the lights would change colour to mimic day, dusk, night and then dawn and all the lights on the vehicles and houses would turn off and on to go with it. As I mentioned before there were little buttons along the edges you could press to make things happens, such as make the Ferris wheel in the amusement park turn or make a crane pick up a box, little things like that.

I introduced the horse racing drinking card game to some more people that night. I was really spreading that game around. Much the same group as the night before headed out again that night. Nothing particularly exciting happened however. A group of us did check out the street closed to women, but even that was rather disappointing. Just like a smaller, less impressive Amsterdam.

Not much happened the next day, but in the evening while we were hanging out in the basement a couple of local girls came by wanting to interview some of us for a TV show. It was just one of those shows on some local station that probably no one actually watches, but they were doing some bit about backpacking. I declined, but a couple of others gave the interview. I mentioned in the opening paragraph that I learned that Hamburg was more of a stopover place for most people than anything else. It was in these interviews I learned that. When asked why they came to Hamburg pretty much everyone answered that it was because it was on the way to somewhere else. Not great for the Hamburg tourism board I imagine.