Hamburg in English

A guide to Germany's best city. (But not in German). Words and photographs copyright @willrolls.

[hamburginenglish]

Autohate

Like many major cities, Hamburg has two big football clubs; St Pauli and HSV, both with strong identities, distinctive history and a lot of rude chants. And in common with Dortmund-Schalke, Everton-Liverpool, Arsenal-Tottenham, Newcastle-Sunderland, Man U-anywhere within the M25, they are local fanbases philosophically inclined to hate each other's beer-filled guts.

But I'm now ready to declare. I'd like to support both, please. I'd like to be happy when I see that my adopted town has won a football match, regardless of the colour shirt they're wearing.

Problem is, this position is judged to be impossible - a cake-and-eat-it situation; like being a Jew and Muslim at the same time, liking both Blur and Oasis, or driving whimsically down the middle of a busy road. There is a learned, exclusionist mentality in football, passed from father to son, that says that if you love tribally, you are also obliged to hate tribally; once you have chosen your object of love, your object of hate is chosen by default.

Is it delusional to imagine that some football fans have the confidence to support, say Hannover, and also be pleased when nearby Braunschweig pick up points? Or if you really need to feel the heat of hate, it would be better if the rivalries had a bit of logic to them, such as Mönchengladbach despising Dortmund for ripping off their rather cool-sounding 'Borussia' name at the beginning of the 20th century - this theft of IP making them the footballing Samsung to the other's Apple. I could get behind that.

I'm not all peace and love - I think animosity is part of what makes football special, and seeing an opposition player get mocked by a well-penned, mischievous chant is funny. Especially if it's John Terry. Most of them earn in a week what I earn in a year, and they should be able to ride this out.  But with local rivalries, the dislike among fans more resembles a flock of braying, tattooed sheep with smartphones - when other, stronger people have made their minds up for them.

Being taught to hate by dint of what you like is one of society's less appealing creations. Football is one of the better ones. I'll take the latter without the former.

Up the boys in brown! (And blue).

[hamburginenglish]

Get yer skates on

Very occasionally in life, your body will be treated to a physical sensation that is completely and utterly brand new. The first time you were tickled as a child, inhaled a cigarette, wiped an eye with a chili-contaminated hand, were punched in the face, or that first time that someone put their tongue into your mouth whilst kissing. In each of these situations, your central nervous system can't quite believe what is happening, repeatedly asking back for confirmation like the desperate radioed pleas of a field commander on the battlefield in a movie. This is new. This is mad. This doesn't make sense.

If you've done all of the above (I'm still working on being punched), then ice-skating is the next thing to do, and it turns out Hamburg is a great place to do it. Here's what it looks like:

You hold the edge rail and put one foot gingerly onto the ice and instantly feel the brutal, unforgiving slipperiness of it all. Your foot moves backwards or forwards, and does practically anything but stay still. After all, if you put 80 kilos of weight onto a thin blade of metal on frozen water, what can you expect? Grip?

The real terror begins when you realise you've expected to put both feet on there - you're now standing with the confidence of a newborn foal after four double espressos. You grip the handrail for dear life, eyes bulging like a cartoon character, wondering why you paid €4.80 for this 'pleasure', as the next thing that's going to happen to you is that you are going to fall over.

There are two ways to fall - you can fall forward onto the ice with your hands, and hope that a nearby skater doesn't detach your fingers as they pass by on two pieces of sharpened steel, or you can fall backwards, which is far worse. If you're lucky, you'll fall on your bum, and hope that your buttcheeks prevent spinal damage whilst you try to style it out. If you're unlucky, you will feel the whiplash effect as your skull catches up with your back and makes contact with the ice. This is the real reason why people wear thick woolly hats whilst skating. And bring robust gloves whilst you're at it.

But enough negativity. Persist, practice, get tips on how to do it properly, and things will suddenly 'click'. And then you begin to take in what a delight it is. You suddenly start people-watching, and you can see the young parents with their small children, the old-timers with hands clasped behind their back, the colleagues having a natter and the teenage boys dressed in just jeans and a T-shirt. The teenage boys are remarkable; they weave through the crowds like space interceptors going through asteroid fields, and then come to a skidding stop, spraying groups of embarrassed-looking girls with shredded ice. It's a form of mating display that I've yet to see work.

The amazing outdoor ice rink at Planten un Blomen in the middle of the city is the best- you can skate over a huge area, swaying in time to your favourite hits by One Direction, Avicii or Ke$ha, and then use a Glühwein and a hot crepe to restock on your lost calories and dignity. Now and again at the weekends, you will see me there - I'm now part of the intimidating torrent of people, but if you are starting out for the first time, I empathise. You're in for a treat.

[hamburginenglish]

Snap, crackle and pop

This is an ad for my bike tyres. They're made by Schwalbe and have a special 'Green' lining or something that reduces the chance of getting a puncture. The copywriting in this ad is rubbish, isn't it?

Never mind, stick with me; it's not a paid job. 

Yesterday, the first day of 2014, I climbed on my bike and sped through the streets of Hamburg in weak but clear winter sunshine. It's a 1st Jan thing - see what the new year looks like, and attempt to burn off a night of food, booze and cigars whilst my mind attempts to retrieve lost conversations.

The cacaphony of the night before, the euphoria, the pissedness of everyone didn't really prepare me for the debris of delight. A soggy mixture of red firework carboard, wooden launching sticks, plastic caps, carrier bags, vomit, tears, bottle tops and glass. Not a single bottle went unbroken. Tonnes and tonnes of glass, all glinting in the sun:

Cycling through the emptied-out streets, the only noise was one similar to the sound that comes from a child's mouth when they've just taken popping candy. I went over fragments of champagne, beer and whisky bottles, all of which were in hundreds of celebratory pieces. We laugh at the folk in the Middle East who fire off celebratory bursts of gunfire into the air with their AK47s, but at least you can cycle about the next day without worrying about a puncture. 

Yet a puncture, miracle of miracles, is what I managed to avoid. I made it home and got a few nice pics.

Thanks Schwalbe, and happy new year to you, even if you're a bottle bandit.

[hamburginenglish]

Pricks

Spend enough time in Hamburg, you'll get used to seeing the letters 'ACAB' sprayed all over the city's walls. It's never written in that multicolour, 3D way that some grafitti artists use - it is always scrawled hurriedly; a furtive action of just a few seconds in the terrified manner with which you might take a wee in a crowded public park, or buy a Justin Bieber 2014 calendar.

This hurried desire not to be caught is because ACAB stands for 'All Cops Are Bastards'. A really nuanced, thought-through message, if ever there was one - probably coined by someone who also plays GTA and favours jokes with the punchline 'your mum'. The same emotional and intellctual maturity behind these four letters also brought Hamburg to a standstill yesterday, injuring hundreds, terrifying children and ruining the last weekend of Christmas for over a million people.

The background as to why thousands of people faced off against battle-hungry anti-riot Polizei is all about a complex cocktail of quasi-political issues, including the squatters' occupation of a ruined, abused building called the Rote Flora, and the demolition of some buildings near a petrol station on the Reeperbahn. I don't have a full grasp of the ins-and-outs on why these are such emotive issues, but this is the Internet, where a solid understanding of what you're writing about is an optional extra. So I'm going to have a go.

Let's focus on the Rote Flora for a moment. Here it is in all its glory:

The building is owned by a property investor, but his people aren't allowed to go inside (I have to admit, this  baffled me a bit) and instead, a standoff has occurred that pits the evil, grasping property investor in the red corner (if it helps, picture him emerging from a Porsche Cayenne in a tan shooting jacket, pastel chinos and silk cravat), and in the blue corner we have the heroic, anticapitalist freedom fighters who are fighting for, er... well, I'm not actually sure really. Living in someone else's house, I guess.

I'm politically several centimetres left of centre, spot decent arguments from various political parties, yet I have an allergy to the increasingly childish tirades of inarticulate, wild-haired leftist demagogues who are defined purely by what they oppose, not what they propose. Russell Brand is an example from the UK and you can watch him here, whilst in Germany, it seems it's ok reject society's values and align yourself against homophobia, xenophobia and nazis. In my view, opposing things such as racists, homophobes and Nazis shouldn't automatically qualify you as one of the good guys - opposing Nazis is as brave a position to take as opposing toddlers being given crack cocaine. And it certainly doesn't give you the right to take, and ruin someone else's stuff.

So the role of a decent demonstration is to make a point to the open-minded, I guess, and in this respect, Saturday's demo failed to enlighten me in the slightest as to why we should support these occupiers. Instead, the laboured way it was organised and scheduled meant that hundreds of hooded, masked thugs poured into the city, keen for a bit of action against the Pigs (in a farmyard twist, the Police are known as the Bulls in Germany - don't say this to them, though). Paving stones were thrown, cars set alight and the windows of local small businesses were smashed - which is a marvellous way to stick it to the big corporations behind capitalism. Here's a spot of the action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Aw0CtCSUdk&feature=youtu.be

Of course the Police were heavy-handed, and they've got involved in the tedious 'yeah, but they started it' game which no one can win, but at the end of the day, both sides came equipped to fight, and fight they did. It was a complete and utter waste of everything. A waste of ordinary people's weekend, a waste of public resources, a waste of decent beer bottles (I wonder how much Pfand deposit was lost) and, most tragically, a wasted opportunity to make a point to the open-minded. There is absolutely no way on earth that the powers that be would say "Thinking about it, it was the second wave of thrown bottles, stones and traffic signs that finally won me over on Saturday - I've actually finally got your point. How about we grab lunch on Monday and work out a deal?"

So in summary, departing from the careful, even-handed treatment dealt out by most blogs I've read, I think these protesters are pricks. They've so miserably failed to set out their cause, and so ruined everyone else's fun that I can only follow their example and add them to the list of things I oppose.

And I have to concede that knowing what you oppose can be satisfying.

[hamburginenglish]

Dusk to dawn in Hamburg

“Night-time turns people into animals" drawls a sampled quote in a lesser-known, Utah Saints track that the Shuffle feature in my iTunes seems to like. I’ve never placed the film the quote comes from, but it is right - depending on the drunkard, people turn into fierce tigers, cheeky monkeys, bulls on the rampage, slimy lizards and frightened antelopes. Oh, and horned toads. The species you encounter largely depends on where you go.

Meanwhile, on the Reeperbahn, it is utter carnage - the kind of scenes that would be accompanied by rapid African drumming on a nature documentary. Younger males, more hormonally-driven, literally charge through the street in the search of a mate, or, more likely, a fight with another male until blood is drawn. Meanwhile, the females smoke, cackle and totter about on giraffe-like stiletto legs. Bare flesh, tangled hair, fried food and bodily fluids glint under coloured light, whilst in the shadows, you will be offered drugs or the opportunity to mate with someone. There is no way of visiting the Reeperbahn and remaining unenlighted about the human reproductive process.

And settled between these two extremes is Hamburg’s gem. Undestroyed by conflict, elegantly crumpled, simply laid-out, yet not quite so intuitive is the true centre of St Pauli. Many people start a night in Sternschanze and hurry through to end it all in Reeperbahn, rushing through this bit; it isn’t as tourist-friendly, and it’s less in-your-face. Anyway, if you’re the explorer-type, here’s a map of the area I’m talking about:

It’s a place where a lot of the bars and restaurants look like anonymous speakeasies, and this is exactly what they are. Enter any one of these, and you have the highest chance of getting into animated conversation with someone about football, warfare, tits or homeopathy. The food is amazing, ranging from amazing Turkish kebabberies, restaurants with erotic art (Freudenhaus) to Swabian home cooking (Brachmann’s Galeron). And the drinking is tremendous - these are places where people go to drink and talk, not go on the pull. Just try 3 Freunde Bar (cocktails), Luba Luft (upmarket) or that place on the corner where… No, I can’t remember which one it was.

Watch football in Cafe Miller, where the partisan crowd supports two teams: St Pauli and anyone playing HSV. One other bar is called Möwe Stürzflug, which translates as Divebombing Seagull - it has a drinks menu every bit as curious as its name. At this point in time, I haven’t visited any more bars, as I can do without liver failure.

The remarkable thing is that, unlike Reeperbahn and Sternschanze, St Pauli has got a daytime identity that is as strong as its night-time one. Little supermarkets, food stalls and cafes are all very well, but you have very many more unexpected places, such as old-fashioned hardware stores, a model aircraft shop, and shops that specialise in candles and furniture oils. The sex trade is here, yet it’s not really full-on like elsewhere, with the possible execption of one of the street that specialises in transgender sex workers. (I… didn’t make a note of which street it was, so I guess you’ll just have to have the pleasure of finding it)

So there you have it - that’s St Pauli. Go there with someone who has been there before, and you will come back un-mauled and feeling a lot more human.

[hamburginenglish]

Smell of the north

The harbour of Hamburg is like a pair of lungs; inhaling goods and ships' contents and exhaling exports every day. The goods come mainly in containers, but also wrapped, ground, fresh or liquefied. There's an unloading and loading point for each of these, specialised in doing the job as quickly as possible - in the summer, you can lie on the warm sand of the Elbstrand with a fresh pils and a hundred yards away watch a computerised crane play a very sophisticated game of Tetris, dropping containers into the vast maw of a ship's hull.

And inevitably some of these goods smell a bit. I can't quite tell if they're coming or going, but a benefit of being on the East side of the city is that the wind will occasionally carry vast plumes of niff our way - one day it might be curry powder, tobacco, barley or paprika, but most often it's coffee. Believe me, it's the business - cycling to work engulfed in a breeze so filled with gorgeous, delicious, roasted coffee, you can almost convince yourself that the air is very faintly brown.

And if you ever want to get a full nosefull, just jump on your bike, grab a camera and go and explore the ins and outs around Steinwerder. Just check that there hasn't been a consignment of dried manure just beforehand.

[hamburginenglish]

A final homecoming

When you walk around London, occasionally you'll see a blue plaque adorning the outside wall of a house, with the name of someone famous who lived there. It's normally someone whose books you're meant to have read (but haven't), a sporting legend, or the inventor of something useful like wasp repellant. You'll pause for a moment, and then walk on, stunned into silence at how little it means to you today. At best, you'll wonder what the house costs - probably about 5 quid a hundred years ago, whereas now, it can only be afforded by about 5 people on earth.

Hamburg, like other German cities, has a different form of memorial for its residents, and it certainly gives you more to think about:

Germany rightly commemorates the holocaust frequently, in numerous ways; locally, nationally, many of them immense, solemn and moving. The variety and repeated nature of these memorials is necessary, but in my opinion, none works more deeply than this.

If you learn about the deaths of a million people, it's natural to feel frustrated by an inability to summon the sum of sadness required for so much suffering. As Stalin infamously remarked, these are not tragedies, these are statistics. Huge plaques with vast columns of names in tiny letters do their best to pin an identity to the victims, and this is nowhere more visible than when you see the same family name repeated over and over again. But stand back, and once again, you glaze over, unable to take it all in.

The Stolperstein is a much more effective tool for memory. Here, each person, whether Jew, gypsy, gay or simply resistant to the Nazi way of thinking, is commemorated outside the building where they lived or worked. And at the bottom of each one, it is spelt out in plain text the date on which they were 'murdered'. That's an important use of language. Not 'gassed', 'eliminated', 'shot', 'racially cleansed' or any other language that can make you momentarily associate the act with the rows upon rows of deaths committed in the fog of war, but instead, it is put as starkly as if you or I were fatally stabbed tomorrow.

The programme of laying down the Stolpersteine is ongoing, started and driven on by Günter Demnig (what a legacy he'll have) - each one costs about €100 to make. As the research into the life and fate of the victims goes on, the more these little metal objects start to sprout up along the pavements of Germany's cities, caught momentarily in the corner of the eye as people walk along, concentrating on their smartphones. Sometimes it's a family with a number of generations, or just different floors within one building:

What I like most about them is that seeing one injects me with a strange kind of joy. For every one you spot, it is an individual whose memory has wriggled free from the black hole of the millions who died, and has returned to their old address, their name adjacent to the current residents' names on the doorbells. They've escaped statistics and become a human again, with that very memory that had been denied to them for so long. Like me, they probably did things like forgot the day the rubbish was collected, enjoyed a beer on the balcony in June, or had an elderly neighbour in ridiculous glasses who complained about the slightest noise. As a new resident, it's great to see these names return to the neighbourhood. An additional aspect of genius to the format is that their placement in the pavement makes the reader stand for a moment with their head bowed - to any bystander, it looks like what it is: an act of remembrance. 

It's worth spreading awareness of these Stolpersteine - most people don't bother to stop (I had previously walked over hundreds without realising), probably assuming that they're a utilities badge or something. But once you understand their meaning, they become a true symbol of homecoming, back to a street they made their home. This is a brilliant idea worth sharing and sharing.

[hamburginenglish]

When pork meets dessert

Anyone casually familiar with Germany will tell you a lot about autobahns, fräuleins and inevitably, the currywurst.

The curry and the wurst - it's an unlikely partnership of two cultures. It's up there with Aerosmith and Run DMC, Vichy France or Paolo Di Canio and Sunderland for juxtapositions. It's a daring and inspired combination, defying you to disagree with the idea, for fear you'll be called a fuddy-duddy.

On the one hand, you have the sausage - a precision-milled shaft of meat-engineering manufactured to the strictest standards in the world. Then there's the world of curry -  sitars, Bollywood and cows wandering in the streets, with the faint promise of a tantalisingly spicy surprise along the way. Ignore the fact that pork has never, ever, featured in curry, join them in a sort of East-meets-West matrimony, add chips and you have street-food heaven, right?

And Christ it's sweet. It's probably got as much sugar in it as a chocolate brownie, which in my book, makes this technically a desert, or at the very least, two meals in one. Just mentally add a ladle of custard to the image above, and you could potentially be improving matters.

Nutritionally, sausage and chips isn't exactly the healthiest starting-point, and someone, probably in a sort of we're-all-going-to-die-anyway moment of madness, decided to add sticky sauce, just to make sure we go out with a bang.

This blog post is a poorly-disguised appeal to find out if there exists a savoury version of currywurst (are you out there?) But I think it's safe to say you won't enjoy this, unless you're the kind of monster who likes WKD, combining cheese and jam, or are in the late stages of drunkenness. Otherwise, I recommend you stick with the pure German food; a far better pairing alongside Fräuleins and autobahns.

[hamburginenglish]

The old Elbe tunnel: let's get down

Now and again, you'll watch an enormous container ship or cruise liner head up the Elbe, and you will marvel at how thousands of tonnes of steel CAN FLOAT IN THE WATER.

You literally imagine the water becoming heavier at that point; the enormous riverbed straining under the additional weight of the vessel, fish complaining of headaches and structural damage caused to crustaceans.

(Side note: my physics teacher probably didn't think much of me either)

In seriousness, the relentless passage of shipping up and down what barely qualifies as a seaway (we're miles inland, here) does take its toll - it needs to be dredged, and the massive ships can only come up at high tide. And back when they had thousands of actual people working in the docks (as opposed to computerised machinery), there was a huge need for people to cross the half-kilometer width of Elbe to get to work.

So one hundred years ago they built a tunnel - not just any tunnel - one with a real dose of vintage-tiled steampunk retro bling (they didn't know this at the time), which now serves as a great place for musicians to do lo-budget album covers:

It's mad to think this, but cars can actually take the lifts down (with a limit of 11 tonnes, it might cause a problem for an armoured presidential limousine) and drive through, but you'll be as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. Anyway, you probably found this article via Twitter, which means that you don't own a car.

The tunnel itself is a worthwhile sight in its own right - you can walk along and admire the cast brick decorations down the side - fish, eels, seals lobsters all get celebrated in the old designs honouring the contents of the Elbe, along with rats and old boots. These days, it would be empty bottles of Astra, condoms and stag party grooms in mankinis.

But the other side is where the beauty is. You're now on the 'ugly' side of the Elbe, which means that you can stare back at the pretty side and piece it all together whilst supping on a beer in the sunshine. It's an amazing place to go for a chat, actually:

And on the way back, if you're anything like me, you'll allow your imagination to wander upwards, picturing a huge ship gliding over your head, putting that worrying additional bit of pressure on the ceiling...

[hamburginenglish]

Hamburg's singles: an explanation

After noticing that Hamburg has loads of canals, no parking spaces and it occasionally rains, you'll spot something else:

Everyone's single.

That's right, everyone. The guy who drives your S-Bahn to work, the woman who stuffs the Fisch into the Brötchen, the guy who bakes the Brötchen, the guy who bangs on the walls of the flat when the noise rises above whisper level, the guy who tries to pick your pockets in Sternschanze and the policeman who fails to catch him, most probably. No one has settled down.

If you're in a relationship and reading this, then I'm afraid that something bad is about to happen, so it might be best to stop reading...

Let's start with the nightlife:

Sooner or later, if a glance is exchanged that lasts long enough, it will turn into a conversation, and the conversation will end up in a date, and so on. If you're not careful, you'll end up in a relationship, and that, just as with the forboding second half of a Roland Emmerich movie, is where the trouble kicks off...

Moving in together:

Yay! You're in love! One of you will move into the other's flat, you'll put half of your more bulky possessions into storage at your parents' house, and then you'll stand there in the living room feeling awkward. There's something missing. Oh, yes, that's it, a sofa.

You sit in your brand-new sofa, stare at the wall and realise the thing you were really missing was a TV - preferably over 40 inches. You'll both comfortably sit down there with a bag of ChipsFrisch and turn on German TV. And then something like this happens:

To take just two examples, Wetten Dass? or Schlag den Raab are TV formats so noxiously awful, you'll feel your life-force seeping out from your body like a deep stab wound in your ribs. The knocking sound from within your head will be your brain trying to break open your skull and escape down the toilet. You'll get nervous and slowly start to zap through the channels in the hope of encountering something thought-provoking, not perma-tanned and preferably wearing some clothes. The best you can do is take refuge among the ad breaks, positioned as they are like lumps of wood in reptile-infested water.

You briefly consider throwing the TV out of the window, and then you remember you don't have Haftpflichtversicherung, so don't bother. You turn to your partner, think of asking a stupid question about satellite dishes, and then briefly hear a surge of laughter and chinking glasses from the street below and realise that you need to take decisive, pre-emptive action. "I'm sorry, it's not you, it's the apalling selection of programming offered by our state and commercial broadcasters".

There will be tears, belongings will be gathered, but you will both be concealing a slight smirk that you're going to be rejoining civilisation. And so the cycle continues.

When I got hold of my flat at the beginning of the year, I was very surprised to be chosen, and I asked the lettings agent why I had beaten all the other people who'd applied for it.

"The others were couples - you were the only one who wanted the flat for yourself. And in our experience, the couples go their separate ways after a few months".

And you can be sure the one thing you won't fight over will be the TV.

[hamburginenglish]

Sausalitos - the after-work party

"Fancy a drink after work?" asked a colleague, popping their head round the door. The colleague in question was male (still is), and like me, single, but not the desperately-seeking type (no one is, right?). We were clearly due to go somewhere a little more self-conscious. And it was Thursday - day of the infamous After-Work night at Sausalitos bar - we decided to give it a whirl, if only for the scientific purpose of me bringing you the results.

I'm not going to structure this like a review and give you my verdict at the end - I'm going to let you know it's shit right now: it's shit.

The cocktails are reduced from an absurd 14 Euros down to an unremarkable €7, and taste like girls' deodorant. If you order a Mojito, your pre-mixed synthetic drink arrives within seconds, with a solitary mint leaf that resembles a drop-out, presumably thinking of its peers being cheerfully mashed to a pulp in the proper cocktail places across town. The beer is overpriced, and served in plastic beakers. Plastic beakers! Surely this isn't a fighting crowd?

And you look around, you spot the badly-packed aggression, and you realise it could be. The men are strung with the kind of tension that you see among elephant seals in mating season. Black synthetic shirts tucked into their G-Star jeans, hair well-oiled, sleeves rolled up to reveal unnecessary amounts of biceps and wallets safely tucked into their back pockets (always the back pocket with this crowd), they shift their posture and clench their jaws when you cross their path, or block their line of view to their intended female target.

Not that their intended female targets are going to escape their gaze - the ladies here have coloured themselves orange, and easy to spot in the gloom as they totter off to top up on cocktails. We didn't stay to see the inevitable outcome, but long enough to hear Daft Punk's 'Get Lucky' played twice.

There are hundreds of places this predictable in London, and to be honest, it's why I never relished going out there. Hamburg is riddled with interesting, immaculate, dishevelled, wonderful drinking places, filled with awesome people. It's been an education to discover that there are exceptions, after all.

[hamburginenglish]

This is St Pauli

I went to see a game of football on Monday night. It wasn't the first time in the Millerntor, St Pauli's stadium, but the 5 previous times, they had suffered miserable defeats, so I was becoming convinced that I was a bad luck charm for them. One match I witnessed featured an angered fan throwing a full plastic cup of beer at a linesman - it hit him square on the neck, the match was abandoned, and this cost the team 3 points. Waste of a decent beer, too.

Wins against East German clubs are very desirable for St Pauli fans - the club is fiercely left-wing, and the former DDR clubs have an unfortunate reputation for fascist followings, particularly places like Rostock and Chemnitz. So Dresden was considered a 'risk game' with a heavy police turnout, and they had banned alcohol in the visitors' section, but not the home fans. Seemed fair to me, and I so I started spilling Astra all over my internal organs:

I'm a St Pauli follower - I want them to win, but to go so far as to call yourself a fan requires plenty of commitment, the ability to learn a lot of songs and to shout rude words. Oh yes, and to get tattoos, earrings, smoke Lucky Strike and wear brown clothes under a denim jacket that's had its arms ripped off. (I don't smoke).

Funnily enough, the club borrows so heavily on foreign cultures, you don't even need to know any German to join in. They'll pipe up with "You'll Never Walk Alone", or "Forza St Pauli' or indeed chants of "allez St Pauli". It's cosmopolitan, but without being poncey.

It's not a very German club in many respects - the sudden rush of pride that flushed the country during World Cup 2006, sprouting millions of black, red and gold flags hasn't reached this flattened patch of ground West of Hamburg's city centre. They're desperately averse to nationalism, even in its mildest form, which means they proactively strike up alliances with foreign clubs such as Celtic.

There's nothing like the refined slickness of a top-notch Bundesliga side in action, and St Pauli is nothing like a top-notch Bundesliga side. The defence occasionally make heart-in-the-mouth mistakes, and the strikers waste more opportunities than Arsenal did last season. They're a fragile team, which makes every win all the more precious. You'll spend a lot of time clutching your hair when watching St Pauli.

But you know what? No one gives a fuck. This isn't a football match, this is a punk gig without instruments. This is a floodlit gathering of like-minded drunkards. With sausages and fish rolls. My last UK football match was Fulham vs Bolton at Craven Cottage, and I was sat in front of two men (lets call them Nigel and Malcolm), who spent 90 minutes delivering analysis so joyless, so borrowed, so cliched, it would have anaesthetised Mark Lawrenson. And I could hear every word.

So time your trip to Hamburg to coincide with one of the games - the schedule you can see here.

I will, for the sake of impartiality visit HSV, the other, more successful Hamburg team, and let you know how it compares. But I think I've already made my mind up.

[hamburginenglish]

Toilet reading

These are the bogs in a very good bar called Yoko Mono in Sternschanze/Feldstrasse. Graffiti in many of Hamburg's districts is regarded as something desirable, almost as if an absence of graffiti means that no one has shown any interest.

By these standards, these toilets must be bloody amazing:

[hamburginenglish]

Hamburg's best cup of coffee

People who write about coffee are, generally speaking, dickheads.

And people who photograph cups of coffee deserve to have their hard drives seized and callously destroyed by government officials. It's tedious, and sort of suggests that you're the kind of person whose life is so dull, that 'intravenous caffeine' (their phrase, not mine) is the only way to maintain their existence.

But on the understanding that it will be just this once, just like the chap who gets pulled over by the police speeding to his own wedding, I'm going to tell you about Cafe Brooks, where Hamburg's best cup of coffee can be bought. Let's start with a picture of this coffee so we can get the awkard bit out of the way:

Cafe Brooks is actually located in my home neighbourhood - a truly residential place in the Eilbek district (S-Bahn Landwehr), and is so inconspicuous, you could almost walk past it without noticing. And yet it's only 10 minutes from the Hauptbahnhof.

Your only reason for being on the East side of the city is because you are visiting someone who lives here - it's a bit like South London in this respect - there are no real highlights, ironic hairstyles or single speed bikes, it's just full of human beings watching TV and brushing their teeth.

And the cafe itself is nigh-on unimprovable. Whilst the hip-brigade will savour the recovered wood furniture, exposed copper pipes, vintage lampshades and period porcelain, the whole place is actually pretty uncontrived. They don't even have a website, let alone a Flash intro.

And the coffee is why you come here. If you walk into a Starbucks and order a cappuccino, you'll get a puddle of espresso with a dollop of milk foam on the top, reminiscent of protective polystyrene packaging, and they'll call your name out - a faux-personal gesture that is designed to momentarily distract you from the 3 Euros they've just relieved you of.

I'm going to dispense with the food reviewer adjectives and simply say that the cappuccino at Cafe Brooks is very, very good indeed. The hot chocolate is too. You'll want another one, and also have some cake in between, just to balance things out. You'll strike up conversation with a neighbouring table (this never happens in coffee chains), and if you are there later in the day, say, from 11am, they serve beer and basic cocktails. Just watch out for their non-corporate opening hours - this is not a place for the early-riser.

And there ends this blog's one and only coffee post. There will be a post on dancing cats, Gangnam Style and cute pugs along shortly. In the meantime, see you at Cafe Brooks.

[hamburginenglish]

A painful lesson in German language

When learning a language, there's no substitute for actually spending time in the country, people say.

And they're quite right, as I'm about to illustrate.

Once you're playing with the live ammo of a real language in a real country, the capacity for ending up on the wrong bus, or insulting someone, really, really focuses the mind. But most people make it through the process with their health and dignity intact.

I was staying in the house of some family friends who live in Hamburg, and they had gone out for the day, leaving me to my own devices.

And I had a headache. Headaches are quite unusual for me, and this time it was a proper wrecking ball of a headache - one where it feels like drunken, inexperienced roadies are setting up a drum kit within your skull.

I went into the bathroom to look for their headache tablets. Bathroom cabinets are always very delicate places to look in someone else's house. If you don't have time to get drunk with someone, a quick peek in their bathroom cabinet is the next best way to get to know someone quickly - it's a neat way of looking at the browsing history of someone's body and mind.

Anyway, luckily, a packet of Paracetamol almost fell out into my hands. I was so relieved that a word like 'Paracetamol' was pretty international, and there it was, written proudly on the box: "Paracetamol Zäpfchen, 500mg. Dosis: 1 alle 4-6 Stunden." Sounds about right, and I was to take one of them, not two.

And when I took the tablet in my hands, I wasn't surprised. It was a monster, in a shape that I hadn't witnessed before - elongated, with a waxy texture. Like a rifle bullet. How did the Germans manage to swallow these things? I was no fan of our own chalky, powdery tablets, but this was very unappetising. I'd seen the size of the Bratwurst XXLs on the Christmas market, but you could chew those things with your teeth. I was about to find out what it felt like to be a drugs mule. A very large glass of water was called-for.

About 20 minutes later, I was still sitting on the edge of the bathtub, still with a splitting headache, wiping away tears of pain from my eyes. I was going to make one final, heroic attempt to get the thing down me. I shut my eyes, just like the way the movie hero does when he's being tortured and interrogated, and tried to dectivate my gag reflex. On my second pint of water by now, I filled my mouth and tried to swallow, whimpering, but determined. And I heard the front door slam. 

I hadn't exactly been doing anything wrong, like perusing a porn collection, but a strange impulse made me flush this horrid tablet down the toilet, clear up the scene, and go down to meet my hosts, looking as innocent as possible.

Once I'd explained that I was suffering from a headache, the mother of the host family took me to the bathroom, and opened the cabinet, reached to the back, and pulled out some ordinary paracetamol tablets.

"Oh great! Thanks! And... um, what do these paracetamols do?" I said, nonchalently pointing at the pack of terror-tablets still perched at the front.

The mother, an English teacher, chuckled, "Oh, you won't be needing those - they're Zäpfchen! Er, what do the English say, um... suppositories! Our little daughter refused to take tablets, but didn't seem to mind them being put up the bum". As she said this, she smiled mischievously, and made a light-hearted upwards-pointing gesture with her finger. She will have wondered why I was looking at her with profound shock, my trembling, tightly-clenched lips barely able to contain the scenes of open revolution within my insides. My headache disappeared, but my dignity was in the kind of state that would normally warrant hospitalisation.

So there. You've learned a new German word today, or if you're German, I am sure that you have now bookmarked 'suppository' in your must-learn folder. And, spurred on my behind-closed-doors humiliation, I proceeded to throw myself at the German language, eventually took it as a degree, and when presented with my certificate, dressed in my robes and finery, I closed my eyes to briefly remember those crucial moments perched on the edge of that bathtub. The word 'Zäpfchen' arguably got me to where I am today.

[hamburginenglish]

The white car

[hamburginenglish]

The Hamburg beer deathmatch. 5 beers, one winner

When you go out in Hamburg, you will be required to choose between these 5 beers, and if you're not a local, you are likely to be stumped. They're all lagers, North German, but to forestall the pedants, they are not all from Hamburg. I've chosen them because each one represents something special - I mean there's loads of Beck's here too, but I guess if you're over 10 and have a mouth, you know what Beck's tastes like.

Oh, and be reassured, I'm not going to approach this from the point of view of some whiskered beer reviewer and find notes of pistachio and linseed. For a start, due to something dull called the Reinheitsgebot, all German lagers have to be made more or less in the same way. Which means that all of these beers taste pretty decent. Instead I'm going to tell you which beer to drink when, and what it means to be seen holding one, as it may save you being beaten up.

Pronounced "Yay-ver".

The 'Friesisch Herb" on the label means 'Fresian and bitter'. It's a beer developed for rugged but quiet men who live on the wind-whipped coast of the North Sea and say a total of five words per day. When they get home, they nod at their wives to keep the spark in their relationships. Jever tastes intently bitter and dry, which means you have to have another one to re-hydrate. On their Facebook page recently, they did a prize draw to win a trip on a trawler. A trawler! Still, the most remarkable thing about this is that they have a Facebook page.

Carrying a bottle of Jever Pilsener across a bar suggests you are a grown-up; definitely not the type of person who peels labels off beer bottles as they drink.

Getting drunk on Jever involves waking up the next day feeling as dry as a dessicated prune that's been left in the sun all day. But it is worth it.

2. Astra

Pronounced "Astra", preferably shouted loud to be heard over the music.

OK. This beer embodies Hamburg like no other, and has its heartland in the warm, moist, sticky recesses of St Pauli and the Reeperbahn. Its iconic logo is the red heart and the anchor, but frankly, a pair of tits could take the place of the heart.

Its detractors say that Astra gives you monstrous hangovers, but my own personal analysis of this has concluded that Astra is only ever drunk in monstrous quantities - it's a causal link. Taste-wise it's not distinctive - if anything, you don't really pay attention to it, which explains why you lose track of how many you have ingested. If you come to Hamburg and want to say that you have properly 'done' the Reeperbahn (whatever that suggests), then drink Astra.

Another thing worth mentioning is that it is a football beer - Astra Bier is interwoven in the fabric of the raucously-left wing St Pauli football club, which means that this is a bad choice of drink if you are a committed Neonazi. Thinking about it, if you happen to be a Neonazi, my recommendation of drink for you would be battery acid.

3. Flensburger Pilsener

I'm going to get hung up on the plop cap top. Partly becuase you can't say 'plop cap top' when you are drunk, but also because it is highly emotive. The thing is, most people try beer for the first time before they have reached puberty, and frankly, for anyone who is a borderline child, the satisfying, explosive 'pop' is so much more exciting than levering off a metal cap. Once you're grown up, it feels like being a champagne drinker, but without being a wanker.

Also, it has the more practical aspect that if, like me, you're not able to lever off a beer top with a lighter, then you will appreciate Flensburger Pilsener when it comes out of a cool box on the beach.

On the downside, the ploptop sort of suggests that Flensburger might be the kind of beer for people who take a few sips, and then reseal to consume the rest at a later date. These monsters also print off supermarket coupons and iron their bedsheets, and they must be stopped.

Oh shit, I've almost run out of space and not talked about the beer! It's bitter. Bitter, but nice. Yeah.

4. Holsten Pilsener

In the UK, I grew up with Holsten Pils. Then, just like the KLF, Paul Gascoigne's career and porn magazines in hedges, it just disappeared, leaving nothing more than a few decent Griff Rhys Jones ads on YouTube.

Tellingly, because I grew up with it, I associate the taste with long walks home in the pissing rain, Jesus Jones and girls saying they didn't want to dance with me. I'll admit, it's at a disadvantage here, like the child of a former nemesis finding me as their interviewer for a job.

And I'm not going to be kind. This beer is the worst of a good bunch - there is nothing overtly wrong about it, but you do get the taste of alcohol whisping up your nose even though it's not much stronger than any of the other beers. It's another football beer, aligned to the much more successful HSV team in the Bundesliga. But it's Astra that is in a higher league here.

5. Ratsherrn Pils

Pronounced "Rats-herr'n"

This is the winner. This is the best one. Drink this. It really is from Hamburg, it tastes lovely, it's from an independent brewery, it's an old beer brand rescued from obscurity, no one will beat you up for its political or footballing affiliations, and you should visit its home bar, the Altes Mädchen in Sternschanze where you can try their other brews. Like the nice kid at school, it's impossible to take the piss out of it, so you just smile and ask if you want to meet up on Saturday.

Its only downside is that you can't find it everywhere - it is still getting going, but hopefully this, and all the other love it's getting will help do the trick.