Hamburg

At the end of my parent's visit, we headed to Hamburg for a couple of days, leaving Wednesday morning. Both Jérémi and Béla were able to get some sleep on the train on the way there at least.
After arriving and making it to our hotel, we headed out for a much needed lunch. Despite how precarious this looks, I managed to eat this soup without dripping on the white baby carrier (or on the baby, for that matter).
After lunch we headed out to take advantage of the nice weather, going for a walking tour around St. Pauli, Hamburg's famed red light district, which is also home to the football stadium, and the hotel where we were staying. Here's the police building on the Reeperbahn, which apparently helps keep St. Pauli the safest neighbourhood in Hamburg.
I loved these ceramic soldier's heads sticking out the side of the building, keeping watch.
Prostitution is legal in Germany, and as a result you don't get the same presence of streetwalkers that you'd expect in a red light district in Canada, since the women are warm and safe (or safer) inside in brothels. This particular block houses only brothels, and is in fact off limits to women (presumably excluding employees) and men under the age of 18.
From there we kept walking toward the water, where we were treated to some lovely views as the sun was getting lower in the sky. The dome-topped building seen in this picture housed the elevator for an old tunnel under the Elbe. Rather than building a long, sloping tour under the river, they built a large elevator which could transport vehicles and pedestrians, and a deep, flat tunnel connecting it to another elevator on the other side.
Here's a view of the working side of the port, as the sun was setting. I can't stress how lucky we were with the weather - Hamburg isn't known for cloudless, sunny days. I remember telling colleagues in Victoria that I was going to work at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and they all assumed I meant the one for Meteorology in Hamburg, and they warned me that if I hated the grey, rainy winters in Victoria, I shouldn't consider moving to Hamburg. Luckily, Jena is not so cursed, and we lucked out for our three days in Hamburg.
Here's the tower of St. Michael's church, one of the landmarks downtown. The upper portion is clad in copper, which had been recently replaced, and hadn't yet fully oxidized, and looked sort of dark brown rather than the usual green or shiny and copper-coloured. (The very top looks a bit more green, due to rain, I imagine, but the vertical faces looked almost like they were covered in matte brown plastic siding.)
And the namesake of the church, slaying a dragon.
After walking around for a few hours, I was tired, and really not up for going out for supper. We headed back to the hotel, and mom and dad went out and found some take out while Jer and I hung out with Béla and got a bit of rest. We all got to bed early enough so we'd be well rested for the next day, with our big trip to Miniatur Wunderland, the largest model train exhibit in the world. It's located in one of the beautiful old warehouse buildings in a part of the city known as Speicherstadt, or Warehouse City.
This was also part of my dad's birthday present, and we'd sent along admission tickets for all four of us (Béla was free, of course), and tickets for a behind-the-scenes tour in English for my mom and dad. (Jer and I opted to not take the tour, because they warned that the spaces were very narrow, and there was an upper weight restriction that Jeremi exceeded, and I figured it wouldn't be the easiest place to bring a baby.)

The exhibit is split into depictions of several different regions of the world, including Switzerland, Austria, a few different regions of Germany (including the city of Hamburg), Scandinavia (complete with real water, ships and tides in their Denmark section), and the US. They're working on an airport at the moment, as well as parts of France and Italy.

Here you can see part of Switzerland, at the foot of the Matterhorn, at night. (The lights automatically dimmed every 20 minutes or so, and switched to night mode, so you could see all the little lights of the exhibit being illuminated, and then dawn broke again.)
Here's a view into the Lindt chocolate factory. They had a conveyor belt with uncovered chocolates going into one of the machines, and then foil-wrapped chocolates coming out. I was actually thinking the the machine was wrapping the chocolates, before realizing that there were two separate loops, one covered in unwrapped chocolates and one covered in wrapped ones. Every time someone pressed the button to start up the factory, a chocolate came out of the slot at the lower left.
Here's part of the Italian section of Switzerland, again at night. (We didn't only take pictures at night, but they look really nice.)
Here we're consulting the guides in order to get our bearings...
...and dad's checking out the view in Switzerland from the level above.
Next is a picture from their behind-the-scenes tour, which ended up being a private tour, as there were no other English speakers booked for that day. (I called in advance and arranged that there would be a tour in English, as it's not offered daily.) They loved the tour, and found the technology behind the cars even cooler than that of the trains. The cars all run on rechargeable batteries, and follow copper strips buried beneath the roads. Once they start to run low and slow down (as timed between set points on their routes), they automatically drive themselves into the charging station, where chargers clamp down on either side, charging them through their side mirrors. The entire process is entirely automated.
There are something like 200 000 figurines in the exhibition, and the level of detail is quite impressive. There are lots of small, funny scenes if you look for them, including a great deal of sex in the bushes. (Apparently in the European sections, all the sex is outdoors, while in the US section, it's all within the buildings, which often can't even be seen by visitors, but which keeps the employees entertained.) Here' an outdoor theatre, with a curtain that retracts periodically to show moving performers on the stage.
After this, we headed to find a restaurant for a late lunch. The day before we'd walked along a nearby street lined with Spanish and Portuguese restaurants, so we headed in that direction. En route, we stopped to feed Béla, who was even hungrier than the rest of us. While getting him back into his carrier (while crying), an older woman walking by stopped to give us some unsolicited parenting advice, telling us that the baby was exhausted, and he needed a bed rather than a carrier, because he needed to sleep lying down. We were polite, and thanked her for her advice, but told her that we were doing just fine. She didn't stop there though, asking why we wouldn't take advice from an experienced mother, and didn't we want our baby to be healthy. While it was unpleasant to have to argue with a very insistent old woman while holding a crying baby, it wasn't the end of the world. And I really was polite - after translating the conversation for my mom, who was there, she was surprised that we were so nice to her. But she meant well, right?

We eventually got to the restaurant, where we were able to settle down to a late lunch of tapas and sangria. Unfortunately, Béla woke up and got pretty fussy at lunchtime. I decided to go for a short walk around outside, hoping to get him back to sleep, which often works. However, while walking around with the crying baby, the same pushy old woman happened to come walking by, about an hour and a half after I'd last seen her. (Of course she didn't manage to stumble across us while he was happily sleeping in his carrier, oh no.) This time she didn't even pretend to start it like a normal conversation, but just started yelling at me that babies needed to be in beds. I yelled back (less politely) that this really wasn't her problem, and that she should just be on her way. She yelled back that it really was a problem, and that she should call the German equivalent of Children's Aid, as I was clearly mistreating my baby. I'm not exaggerating when I say that we were yelling - a waitress at another restaurant came out to see what was going on, and Jeremi heard us from down the block, and ran over to add to the yelling, telling her to leave. (He claims that she was already starting to leave at that point, but I'm not so sure.)
After this, I was exhausted and upset, and didn't even feel like going back to finish lunch. We had planned on going on a bus tour that afternoon (to avoid having to walk too much, as I was still trying to take it a bit easy), but Jer and I decided to head back to the hotel with Béla, and my parents went ahead without us. I know I shouldn't have let one nasty old woman change our plans for the afternoon, but it was nice to have a bit of a rest anyhow.

That evening, once my parents were back, we headed out to a restaurant-lined street north of the hotel, Schulterblatt, where we had our last supper together. (Or mostly together - I spent some time out back in the beer garden feeding the baby, so we didn't really eat exactly together.)
And here my parents were able to say their goodbyes to a still-conscious Béla.

The next morning he managed to sleep in the sling through breakfast, the metro ride to the train station, the half-hour wait for my parents' train, the hour long wait after that for our train, and then through the first two out of five train rides (and more than half of the trip) to get home. (Jer did bring his little hand out of the sling to wave goodbye to my parents after they'd boarded their train, which got everyone crying.) We ended up waking him, as he'd slept for six hours straight, and as much as it made our trip easier, he really needed to eat something. He was a complete champ for the whole trip back to Jena, despite the fact that I'd booked us cheap tickets on a five train-six hour route, rather than the nice two train-four hour route we took on the way there.

In fact, the trip home went so well, that it made us forget the terrible afternoon the day before, and decide that it would be a good idea to go meet Chris and Karen (my brother and sister-in-law) in Paris next week rather than having them come to Jena to visit us. At this rate he's going to be such a well-travelled baby!