Today was the first day of the Hamburg Programme, which is 5 days of activities for the international students at HAW Hamburg to get to know each other. (By the way, HAW stands for Hochschule fur Angewandte Wissenschaften, which means University for Applied Sciences.) Today was the Meet & Greet at the central campus on Berliner Tor, followed by a scavenger hunt or "schnitzelyacht."
The day was pretty busy, and very tiring, but it was fun! At the Meet & Greet, we played get-to-know-you games and then had lunch in the cafeteria. There are international students here from Finland, Norway, Holland, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Kenya, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, Thailand, China, Australia, the United States, and more--over 120 students total! I had lunch with an Iranian student named Negin.
After lunch, we headed over to the Dammtor subway station to start the scavenger hunt. Negin has lived in Hamburg for a while, and she went with me to help me find the correct stop. She had to go to work, so she couldn't go on the scavenger hunt. But when I got off at Dammtor, a lot of the other students were already there, so I found new people to talk to.
Our scavenger hunt team had seven people: me, three other American girls, a Finnish girl, an Israeli girl, and a Turkish guy. We called ourselves Team Schneller, which means "faster." I think that name jinxed us.
We weren't even to the first stop when one of the other American girls got a really bad pain in her side and she could hardly walk. All of us waited for a couple minutes with her, but when it didn't go away she told us to go on without her. She and her friend went off to buy some water, and the rest of us went on our way. We walked past the Kunsthalle (art museum) and then the Hauptbahnhof (main train station), at which point our Israeli teammate had to leave and went to get on the train to go someplace. So our team of seven was now down to four, and neither the Finnish girl nor the other American girl had super-sturdy walking shoes. Plus, the clues started to get confusing. So as we made our way along the Mönckebergstraße (the major shopping street) past the famous Bratwurst stand and St. Petri church, we started to lose interest in the whole thing. We passed the Rathaus (city hall, which we will tour later this week) after that, and then had to take the subway to the harbor down on the Elbe River at the south end of downtown. At the harbor it was really cold and windy, and clouds were coming in. We wandered around for a while trying to find the entrance to the Elbtunnel, which is an underground passage beneath the river to the other side. We did finally find it--and it was kind of a crazy structure (pictures coming later)--but after that we were really over it. The last stop we managed was the new building for the Elbphilharmonie (the philharmonic orchestra), but by then it was so late that we didn't have time to finish. It was almost dark by the time we finally got to the Bar Sausalitos, where we were supposed to meet everybody else. We got there probably half an hour late. Needless to say, Team Schneller was not "schnell" at all--we were more like Team Langsammer ("slower")!
So, yeah . . . this was my first time in a "bar." It was a restaurant too, but more jam-packed than any restaurant I've ever been in. I ordered limeade and what I thought was a sandwich, but it ended up being only bread and tortillas with dipping sauce, salsa, and guacamole. I think it was more like an appetizer . . . needless to say, it was a really weird thing to eat for dinner. At least the salsa and guacamole were pretty close to authentic. I was so hungry and tired that I didn't really care what it was, though. It was food, and I ate it. The point is to replenish your energy, right?
Oh, which reminds me of this morning. I made oatmeal but I didn't have any sugar to put in it, and salt still seemed too boring. So I looked in the refrigerator, took out my jar of raspberry jam that I bought for PB & J, and stirred a spoonful into the oatmeal. It actually did the trick. Ah, the eating habits of a college student . . .
Anyway, I left the bar once I had eaten, because I was tired and didn't want to stick around to see everyone else get crazy. So I found my way back to the subway on my own, and got home without incident. It was a long day, and a pretty exhausting one, but I have to say, there are some really beautiful buildings in the city. I can't wait to go back and explore them, especially the churches! We're touring the Rathaus and St. Michaelis Church on Thursday, so I can't wait for that!
Time for bed . . . zzzzzzzz . . .
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