Hamburg - DAY FOUR

Day Four
June 5, 2006

Today was our last day in Hamburg and as I mentioned, since Mike had to work the three of us decided to take a boat cruise. Now thinking of doing things and actually doing them are two different things all together. We asked Mike to wake us up at 8am, and, well, we woke up around 10am wondering why there was no wake up call. I guess Mike forgot or figured we should sleep in since it was crappy weather outside.

We got out of bed and went to meet Marilyn at her room and headed out for a quick breakfast and coffee. We then walked to the harbour and it was getting a little too chilly and cloudy so we figured the boat cruise would a)take too long & b)we really didn't feel like it any more. We decided to walk over to the gothic church we could see peaking through the buildings instead.

We had a very nice and short walk to the church, and for the life of me I can not remember the name of it. Damn it! (St. Nikolas or Nikolai or something maybe) Let's just call it the 7500 meter look-out church. We had a nice walk because it was holiday monday and the streets were really empty. Hamburg has that big city feel but yet you don't feel like you have to walk shoulder to shoulder with crowds of people... like you do in Dublin.

We found the church and realized there was really only the tower and some walls and no roof. We read the plaque on the gate and it looks like the Russians hit this one dead on. Having been destroyed, it's interesting that they didn't try to fix it and just left it. It is a odd feeling standing where an altar should be, looking around and seeing the sky and surrounding buildings.

We then decided to pay the 3€ each and take the lift to the top for a better view. Once in the elevator I read that the look out was at 3,500 meters which kind of freaked out Marilyn... but she soon became more freaked out and remembered that she was afraid of heights. How do you forget things like that? So as I held Marliyn's attention and made sure she concentrated on me rather then the outside views I was trying hard not to laugh as Jess was standing in front of me letting me know (without Marliyn seeing) how high the elevator was... "we are at 4,300...5,000...6,000" then we stopped, and we realized we were at 7,500 meters up, which we decided not to mention to Marilyn 'til we got down. Once out of the elevator it was all good.

The views were ok. I've seen better. Once you see Paris from the Eiffel Tower it's hard to top it. We bummed around there for a couple of minutes took some pictures and made our way down.

From there we walked back to the hotel room cause we knew Mike would stop in for lunch around noon to say bye.

We arrived around noon and sat outside in the backyard catching some sunshine which started to come out finally. We had some munchies and wine and waited 'til Mike showed up. An hour passed and Mike had to leave so we said our goodbyes and called a cab as we had to leave soon as well.

Cab came, we got in it and headed off to the airport. We were early and decided since you can smoke in the airport we might as well have one last pint and smoke. At 3:30 pm we went to our gate expecting the plane to be there and, well, it was not there. Long annoying story short... Plane was late coming from Dublin. Crew did their best to clean it and fuel up as fast as they could. Once we got on the plane the pilot said we will only be 10 min late getting to Dublin, he would make up the time. So that's good I thought. Then there was this really odd jerk to the plane. I assumed that was not good, as in the last 30 plane rides or so I've never felt that. Couple of minutes passed and the pilot came on and said the person driving those little cars that push the planes out started to push too early, THE BREAKS WERE STILL ON! So now they had to get the Lufthansa airplane mechanics to come and take a look at the wheel to make sure it wouldn't fall off on landing or something... which is always a good thing. Haha. So that took some time, then we had to wait for the manager of the mechanincs so we sat there on the plane for about another hour and ahalf in front of totally drunk and retarded loser Irish guys on their way back from a stag. Out of control. Even the flight attendants were telling them that they would kick them off the plane if they were going to be obnoxious.

We eventually got home!

Great weekend! I am glad, we are glad we were able to do this!
Next plan is to get my parents over to Europe!
So that's that! Germany. Next is Croatia in 2 days! We can't wait!

OH YA - GO POLAND GO! WORLD CUP 2006