Our visit to Hamburg (officially known as the title above) included a trip to its harbour, (2nd largest port in Europe). It’s scale makes clear that what seemed to be a very large 20ft container with our contents (now safely in NZ) is a small speck on one of many container ships spotted in the harbour.
Hamburg also has relevance for me as the base of BP Lubricants German operation. Whilst our stay did not include a visit to the “office” my former Marine Lubes colleagues will known the significance of the letters MSC spotted on one of the ships coming into the harbour as we sat for lunch at a “beach” cafe.
The highlight of our short stay however was visiting Gabi, Andreas and their children Theo & Wilko. Gabi spent time in NZ studying with Maria, became good friends, and was bridesmaid at our wedding, whom we hadn’t seen since Milan was 3 months old. It was great to catch up with Gabi & meet her family in their nice warm and spacious home (key criteria for luxury when you’re otherwise staying in a campervan!)

JR

On Wedneday we went out into the centre of Berlin to see a friend of our mum and dads called Claudia. She is a fashion designer and had her own stall in a market in Winterfeld Platz, which is a place in Berlin. She recommended a museum called Spektrum, so we decided to go there and see what its like. It was a huge museum and had a science museum next to it which had a big model of an airplane hanging from it. Spektrum was packed with hands-on science displays and and there were lots of things to do and look at like at the Launchpad at the science museum in London.
After the museum we decided to go to a building called Panorama Punkt (panorama point). We went there because we wanted to get a good view of Berlin from above. It was 24 floors high, and had the fastest lift in Europe which we used to get up. It went 8.5 meters per second and we went 90.6 meters high. We got a great 360 degrees view of Berlin and saw many of the places we had visited previously.

The day had been great but a bit chilly weather but was lots of fun.

NR

PS: (by JR) The Winterfeld Platz Markt also had fantastic chicken Shwarmas in a place called Habibi’s & we also met an interesting man who was selling pillows made from “Dinkel Spreu” (some sort of spelt straw). Nilay was lucky enough to be given a free small pillow which now goes everywhere with him.

We first started learning how to do poi at the One World Festival back in England where one of the workshops was learning circus skills. One of the main attractions in this workshop was poi so Nilay and I tried it out. It turned out to be great and we insisted that we got a pair so we made our own poi out of socks with tennis balls in their heels trapped in by knots with a string tied to the end.
These were great to practise with but not so good for a “real” performance, which we want to do at our leaving party in Emmendingen in Germany.
In Berlin we researched where we could buy poi, and we found a great little circus shop in Charlottenburg. On Tuesday we went there and Nilay and I could both choose a nice new pair of poi with silk scarves attached. We are going to use them for performances.

Milan

Yesterday – it was post marathon Monday – the 4 of us and Jayesh’s cousin Amisha who has been spending a few days with us, participated in a guided walking tour of Berlin.
Our very knowledgable guide Michael took us around all the main sites from the Hackscher Markt via Museum Island to Checkpoint Charlie, the remaining bits of the Berlin Wall, to the car park which was the site of Hitler’s bunker and the Brandenburg Gate and many more. For 4 hours we learned and listened and walked while admiring this amazing city, its history and the ways it is coming to terms with its history. At the end of the walk we admired a pink sky as the sun was setting to the west of the Brandenburg Gate.
We were most impressed with our english guide’s extensive knowledge of all things historic or political reaching from Berlin in the ice age to the present days.

Maria

Taken & edited by Nilay