Hamburg History

All museumed-out today. First thing this morning, Jorinna and I hit up the Art museum, spent too long in the old masters, and had to breeze past the Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso rooms to make it to the Hamburg Museum on time. That was essential research for this evening's visit to The Hamburg Dungeon, a commercial Disney-like historical ride/museum with live actors trained to scare the crap out of guests. The problem was it would all be in German and unfortunately, Ich cann nicht Deutsch sprecken. We learned the correct history of Hamburg before getting the pop version: the huge fire of 1842, the capture and gruesome execution of the pirate whose name I can't spell ( he got the officials to promise not to kill the members of his crew who his headless body managed to run past after his head was cut off. His body walked but all the crew were executed anyway!). There was also a flood in 1717 when a huge storm from the North Sea caused the waters of the Elbe river to wipe out a large part of the harbour city. That was not in the Museum but was in the Dungeon.

One horrific statistic I learned from the Museum was about the Jewish community: over 17,000 lived there before the Second World War, and only a few hundred remained by 1945. Over 8,000 were murdered during the war. Also since 1613 when the first Jewish merchants came there from Portugal, they had faced persecution every few decades. There was a whole section dedicated to their story and every progression in time had the same: more persecution. This was so frustrating to read. Always persecution.

So floods, fire, pirates, and war were big parts of this city's history. The Dungeon did a good job making sure we remembered all that. I don't know if I should say how the tour ends because others may want to see it.

After that fun experience we ate at the best quality fast food restaurant I have ever seen: Jim Block, a less expensive version of a fancier restaurant. You order like at fast food but you get served on glass plates with actual cutlery, not disposable. And the food is good quality. Next we saw a movie in a "small" Hamburg theatre. The Tourist was shown in English with no subtitles at Siet's theatre. Huge differences of note from Canadian theatres:
- designated seating
- comfortable resto and lounge with coffee and liquor bar available while you wait before the show
- the "small" theatre is bigger than most Canadian theatres, even our Silver City ones. A normal-sized theatre is that plus a half. Hamburg is, after all, a city of 4.4 million while Wpg has 633,000+.
- there's curtains in front of the screen that swing open and shut: first for the ads and previews, then again for the main attraction.