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appropriate place for a hamburger
Thursday, August 1 2019
location: Room 5115, cruise ship Vasco da Gama approaching a dock in the harbor of Kiel, Germany
We were docked back in Kiel, Germany, and had to be out of our cabins by 7:30am. There was, however, the usual breakfast available up on the Lido Deck in Club Bistro. Both Gretchen and I got our last meal of dosas and chutney (and, for me, also sambar and hashbrowns), and Gretchen had a long final chat with the guy who has been painstakingly making our dosas fresh one at a time. He's from Kerala State in southern India, though I forget the name of the city.
We hung out with Gretchen's parents and went with them through the whole disembarkation process, which (in Kiel) happened from the 6th Deck, not the 3rd (which we'd used in all the other ports). There was good WiFi in the portside customs/immigration building, where we waited for our various buses. While doing that, some guy who works as a investment advisor struck up a conversation with Gretchen on the topic of animal-rights-friendly investing, something he specializes in. You would think a vegan cruise would be a good place to market his services given all the vegans with obviously disposable income. But Gretchen already has a vegan investment advisor. And most of our investments are now in real estate.
Gretchen and I would be taking a bus directly to the Hamburg airport to, at the minimum, drop off our stuff. Gretchen's parents, meanwhile, would be staying in Hamburg for a week, and so would be taking a bus to the center of the city. At the last minute, we realized our buses were separate. So we said goodbye, with the understanding that we might reconnect later somewhere in Hamburg.
The meditative comfort of the bus to Hamburg was just what I needed after days and days of running from one spectacle to the next. I stared out the window at the flat German countryside rolling past, looking into the cabs of the trucks as we passed them. The height of the bus allowed me to see things I might not normally be able to from a conventional car. I didn't see anything all that interesting, but I was struck by the fact that nearly every trucker I saw was holding a half-smoked cigarette and (usually) some sort of drink, often something like Red Bull. I'd been noticing that there are more smokers in Europe than there are back in the United States. This suggest that American anti-smoking policies have somehow been more effective in a country that exports tobacco. Mind you, it's not that Germans haven't taken their own unique measures to discourage smoking. The largest printed features on cigarette packs and cartons, for example, are graphic (though, strangely, hard to discern) images of lung cancer.
At the Hamburg Airport, a helpful (and sharply-dressed) limo driver told us where our hotel was. It was one of the Ibis chain, and Ibises are usually very close to the airport. The Hamburg Ibis, though, was about a kilometer away. Again, though, we needed the exercise. There were also some delightfully sour wild blackberries along the way.
Again, we were early for our hotel room, but by giving away some of her information, we were able to check in and get to our room early. The air was a little stuffy in there, but it was clean and quiet. We both took showers, climbed into bed, and quickly fell asleep. We napped for hours.
On the other end of those naps, Gretchen tried to coordinate with her father to arrange a place for us to have dinner. Her father wanted to go to a place called The Loving Hut, but Gretchen didn't want to go to some place "run by a cult." Instead, she wanted to go to a casual vegan restaurant called Froindlichst. Further messages were exchanged and it seemed as if Froindlichst was the agreed-upon place. Gretchen used some sort of app to hail a cab, which took us directly to the agreed-upon place. Froindlichst's outdoor area was already full, but that was exactly where Gretchen wanted to be. There was immediate evidence of some sort of personality clash between Gretchen and one of the waitresses and it was looking like we were going to have to sit at one of the tables in the now-empty dining room. There's a lot more flex in what I find agreeable than there is in what Gretchen does, but the indoors really wasn't all that bad.
We waited there for awhile, and then Gretchen got a message from her dad saying he was at the Loving Hut and asking where the hell was she. Let this be a cautionary tale about the excessive use of pronouns. Since it was too difficult for one or the other of us to go elsewhere, we elected to eat our meals at our separate respective restaurants.
One advantage of not eating in a Loving Hut is that alcohol can usually be had at other restaurants. That was definitely the case at Froindlichst. I ended up having not one but two big sixteen ouncers of beer. I started with Lammsbräu Weiße and then tried Friday, their American-style IPA. I'm rarely impressed by European IPAs, and tonight's experience didn't offer any surprises in that department. But that weiße was damn good.
We started the food portion of our meal with a mixed basket of fried foods. It contained onion rings, french fries, "chicken" nuggets, and sweet potato fries. I liked everything except that last one. There's just something wrong with sweet potatoes.
As for the main course, I ordered the Chili Cheeze Burger, featuring some sort of mystery patty (it wasn't one of the name-brand ones). It proved to be one of the best hamburgers I'd ever had in my life (if the rubric for hamburgers includes all cheeseburgers). This was somehow appropriate, since it was the only hamburger I had ever eaten in Hamburg, the namesake of a great many sandwiches. Hopefully I can have a similar experience should I ever go to Frankfurt. As for Gretchen, she had some sort of salad bowl, which seemed like a waste of a Hamburgitunity. She also got a pint of vegan icecream (the smallest size they had) and decided after one spoonful that it wasn't for her. That was a bit of a waste.
After our meal, Gretchen had the the idea that we could ride the two or so miles back to the airport on Lime scooters. We'd seen a couple here and there, and I already had the app on my phone. Using the Froindlichst WiFi, she also installed the app, and then we set out for the nearest pair of Lime scooters indicated in the app's map. But when we got the scooters, we ran into problems unlocking them because there was no WiFi available where they were. And we couldn't just drag them to where there was WiFi because whenever we tried to move them, an alarm sounded that continued until they were put back where we'd found them. So that's how they solve the theft problem.
So we walked back to the good WiFi at Froindlichst and looked for other scooters. Our phones were running out of power by this point and I wasn't sure we'd be able to successfully conclude our scooter rental once we got to the airport even if we could find scooters where there was WiFi and then unlock them. Gretchen attributed my pessimism to drunkenness, betraying a deep misunderstanding of my tolerance for beer. Two beers is not going to affect my ability to dispassionately predict how likely some internet-based technology is going to work. [REDACTED]
Our second attempt to get a Lime scooter failed even though usable WiFi was very close to the scooter. It just wasn't close enough. So Gretchen fired up that app and got us a taxi.
Jackdaws at the Hamburg airport.
Weird tee shirt in Hamburg. Okay, Pizza Queen!
Weird German dog food in Hamburg.
The scene in Froindlichst in Hamburg.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190801 feedback
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