Hamburg ::: Days 2, 3, 4 ::: Whatsupdontfart

I spent the last 3 days (September 25-27) in Hamburg with Izaak and his friends. It was crazy fun.

We didn't do much of the tourist stuff because the people I got to know hate the tourists. Instead, I got to hang out with regular people in Hamburg and be a non-tourist for a while.

We spent a lot of time at Plan B in St Pauli, a hip neighborhood undergoing / resisting gentrification, which is also home to many of Izaak's friends. You can find many bars, cafes, cool shops, cool people, prostitutes and Hell's Angels here. And it's very close to the harbor and fish market.

Plan B is a housing project in St Pauli that Izaak's German friends Lars and Manny built. It's not a housing project like we think of them in the states, though. From what I understand, if a plot of land is sitting unused in Germany, citizens can take the land, and the government will pay 80% of the building costs to put up a housing project.

The first floor of Plan B is a spacious and welcoming apartment that about 12 people and a couple dogs call home. The exterior of the building is painted from corner to corner with a giant "NIEN" in green and blue. The ground floor to the first is covered in graffiti, and everyone throws their trash on the street outside (and it gets cleaned up each night). Some faux laundry hangs outside Lars' balcony.

I thought it was strange that these really awesome, intelligent people would make their street look so junky, especially considering that the interior is nicer than any apartment I've ever owned. But Lars and Izaak had an explanation ready. Through gentrification, the neighborhood is becoming more "spießig,"  meaning "bourgeois" or "yuppie." This means that the regular people living here won't be able to afford living here for much longer. And so they intentionally make the neighborhood look unattractive to make it unappealing to the upper classes, hopefully slowing down the process of gentrification. Totally brilliant and a perspective I had never considered before.

This is also a culture that is very politically active. They routinely riot, about things I really don't know anything about. I guess some Nazis still exist here, so obviously, that causes a major confrontation. But also, people protest over things like the gentrification of St Pauli and the attempt to close a nearby squat. The squat contains artist lofts, a free bike shop, and a skatepark. This was a building that was sitting unused, so regular citizens just decided to take it over and make something useful out of it.

It was very fun and interesting to get a young person's perspective on what it's like to live in Germany, where "everyone over the age of 65" is a murderer. Not my words, but it seriously came up in conversation.

Some other super fun things that happened:

Friday:

Walked around town with Izaak, seeing the sites.

Watched bike films on Friday night with a bunch of bike nerds (my favorite kind of people) at Plan B. And then Robin spent all night trying to replicate the bike tricks in Lars' room, on the street, and in the bar.

Played ghetto gambling, which I'm going to teach everyone to play once I get home. Or maybe I'll pick up some dice and make new friends in my next hostels.

Izaak coined a new phrase: what's up don't fart. Very confusing to the Germans, but gets some good results.

Rode a tall bike for a fraction of a second, got scared and demanded that Izaak get me down. Then we drank in the bar across the street until dawn.  

Saturday:

Rode around St Pauli with Lars and Izaak on a borrowed fixey. We snuck into the hospital and went up to the top-floor balcony, which has the most amazing 360 view of Hamburg. A giant concrete Nazi bunker in the center of town can be seen. It still exists only because it is too expensive to tear down.

Saw P.O.S., a hip-hop artist from Minneapolis, at Hafenklang. Played thumb-wars with him in the middle of his set. Lost. And then lost again 3 more times later in the evening.

Drank several Astra beers, which nobody told me are like 8% alcohol by volume. So I went back to Plan B and passed out, while everyone stayed at Hafenklang and went to the fish market at dawn.

Sunday:

Recovery.