Thereafter I checked out of my hotel and I hopped onto the U-Bahn back to the central train station (a station is a bahnhof and the main station in a city is a Hauptbahnhof; a train is ein Zug, and a platform is ein Gleis). At the train station I secured my roller bag in a locker for €3 so i wouldn't have to drag it around with me before my rail journey was to resume later in the day. 250m from the Hauptbahnhof is the Kunsthalle, a collection of 5 museums and considered one of the best in Germany.
It was pretty cool, and you could take pictures (but no flash photography, of course). The place is a combination of a museum with a traditional floor plan of meandering exhibit halls, but then something completely different shows up. Here's what I mean:
This is a pretty typical museum exhibition room. Next door, there's this:
As I said before, art is subjective, but I thought I'd share with you some of the objects that struck my fancy:
After the Kunsthalle I had just enough time to wander around the very heart of Hamburg. It culminates in the seat of both the city and the state government -- the Rathaus. Yes, all the politicians work in the Rathaus - I'm sure I'm not the first to draw that connection.
Here are a couple of pics I snapped of good old town hall.
After the Rathaus, I hopped on the 2:06 PM high speed ICE train to Berlin, which took less than two hours.
More from Berlin in my next upload.
Location:Hamburg, Germany
That's really interesting how the exhibit rooms at the Kunsthalle are designed differently. Perhaps they were designed at different times? For example, at the Louvre, many of the rooms have been redesigned as typical modern exhibit rooms, but there were a few rooms (on the highest floor, I think) that had large paintings in them from pre-1789, and they retained all of the "decorative" touches of a room in a palace instead of a museum--curtains, lighting, etc. Great pics and narrative! Do you have any general impressions of the people and environment like you had in Amsterdam?:-)
ReplyDeleteApril, thanks for commenting! The Hamburg people are very friendly. Here's one anecdote I forgot to mention earlier - I was getting on the U-Bahn and a guy in a wheelchair was in front of the car door, looking to enter the train. He asked me in German if I could help him over the gap between the platform and the train - I didn't understand the words, but I did understand the intent. He started to talk to me once on the train, and he lit up when I told him I spoke no German. He started speaking to me in halting English, happy to have the chance to practice!
ReplyDeleteHamburg was brightly lit and clean. The people were open, but fewer spoke flawless English, as nearly everyone in Amsterdam had.