Altamira | Hamburg, Germany

A Tuesday evening at Altamira in Hamburg is my idea of perfection.  A sunny atrium, a table covered in a variety of savory dishes, tasty spanish wines, house sangria and great company.  Katrina, Svenja, Moritz, Henni, Marco and I spent the evening stuffing ourselves full of tapas, drinking and laughing harder than I've laughed in a long time.  It was one of those evenings that made me sit back and smile - I'm so grateful for this life.  And I'm so happy to share evenings like this with such good people.

Katrina knocked over a chair on the way out.  Moritz helped, I documented.

the Harbor

We grabbed croissants and coffees and found a quiet bench on a dock in the Ulster.  We sat and chatted and soaked up the sunshine as we gathered our coats around our necks.  Hamburg was chilly that week and it was especially cold on the water.  Still, our visit wouldn't be complete without a ferry trip around the harbor.  We took a bus down to the docks and made our way through the gathering crowd as the boat drifted in and lowered the ramp.  The upper deck filled quickly, but we managed to grab seats near the railing.  The ferry trudged along through the wind across the harbor, pulling up right beside the Dockland Building and letting us off.  We climbed all seven flights of stairs to the top and took a few quiet moments to take in the harbor from above.  Then, we turned and ran back down to the ferry, narrowly making it on board before it disembarked.  Tourists crowded the decks with their cameras and I click-clicked at the buildings over their heads before joining my friends for the short ride back.

Me and the Baltic Sea

After we road tripped up to Lubek and realized that it wasn't exactly right next to the Baltic Sea, we ventured a few miles down the road and spent an hour on the cold and windy beach.  It was beautiful and so windy.  Did I mention it was windy?  You should scroll down and see my arm's reach self portraits, because WOW, was it windy.  And lovely.  It was completely lovely.

Afterward, we drove back down the Autobahn and met Moritz for drinks at the beach club.  We were determined to take Katrina there, but it was so cold and we were so tired from our day trip that we couldn't even finish our drinks.  We were also starving, which was a great thing, because Svenja & Moritz's Parisian roommate, Emma, made us a multi-course french dinner.  Oh yes.  That happened.

Hamburg from above

Marius is a pilot and offered to fly us over Hamburg while we were visiting.  He's a great pilot and, as many nervous jokes as we made prior to takeoff, we felt completely safe in the teeny tiny plane with him flying it.  The flight ended up being one of my favorite experiences in Hamburg thus far and now I really want to fly over other cities.  Seeing it from above, all of the day trips, excursions and neighborhoods suddenly fit together in a way that didn't quite make sense before.  And it was wayyy cooler than looking at a map (which I'm not a fan of, by the way).

Want to see about eight gajillion other aerial photos and my favorite German family?

There's a whole album on Facebook :)

Lubek

During the week we spent in Germany, Svenja took us on a road trip north to Lubek, a little town beside the Baltic Sea that is right out of a fairytale.  It was cold and it rained a little, but we had a ton of fun wandering through the windy streets, browsing a street fair and popping into the shops, despite the fact that we could not seem to locate the sea... which seems a little ridiculous, considering it's quite large.