These Good New Days: Wiedersehen Hamburg, Moin Frankfurt (Tuesday, Sept 2)

The rain has passed for a couple days and the sun was streaming in the window this morning when I woke. I couldn't wait to get out into the beautiful day. The sky is so blue on the pretty days and all the activity is just fun to be out in.

I think the thing that I find so enjoyable, is getting outside after getting ready for the day and having the hotel's amazing breakfast and instantly being among so many people. As I trapse down the cobbled sidewalks, everyone is already ahead of me in their day. Who knows what all their business is, but I see so many people, all nicely dressed and maintained, going, doing, living. I suppose the lack of connecting with the people around me would either change or get lonely if I stayed here longer, but for now, just watching, learning about how the society works, has been enough to keep me interested.

Greg had planned to work this morning and then sit in on some of the post drive interviews. He thought if he could be back by 2:00, that would give us time to get out of the motel by our late check out of 3:00 and still have time to drive down to the Port area and explore a bit before we had to head to the airport for an 8 p.m. flight to Frankfurt.

He said the most interesting thing, besides the feedback the people gave on the feel and preferences they had (these people know and are proud of their vehicles and have definite preferences) was the amazing ability of the man who acted as translator. While the interviewer was asking questions to find out their preferences of the feel of this or that, in an adjacent room, Greg and a couple other engineers sat with the translator who was listening to the audio via headphones of the respondents and speaking the perfectly inflected translation while listening and absorbing the next phrase. His translations were accurate, specific and well emphasized delivery. He himself was British, so it was interesting.

I did my usual walking, overcoming bad blisters I got yesterday from wearing the wrong shoes on a romp to town, by wearing my Chacos (flip flops). The weather was nice and warm.

I am going to post a number of pictures from our drive to the Port district. We were amazed at the endless shipyards holding containers that had either just arrived and were waiting for local distribution, or perhaps there was a container with a family's household goods, being shipped back from a few years of living abroad.

If you look closely, the newer wall of the dock-walk on the left has just been built on the old planks that have been in place for who-knows-how-long.

We thought it was interesting/amazing how the large apartment buildings on the left were cantelevered out over the water for probably 50 feet and still built up 7 stories. We wondered if they did this for the novelty of living over the water, or simply to maximized limited real estate.

We drove over this road which simply must have needed to go this route for the trucks to get to the proper docks and the ground space simpley was not available. So, a simple solution: raise the road over the ground it needs to cover.

Can you see all the containers to the left of the cranes in the photo? There were yards and yards of containers to the left, right, all over this area.