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Elbtunnel
Friday, September 6 2024
location: room 336, 25 Hours Hotel, Hamburg, Germany
This morning during a time when we were both awake, we were talking about rationing the sleep-facilitating drugs we'd brought, and Gretchen mentioned how great it was to take xanax on a plane. As she said that, I realized that "xanax on a plane" sounds a lot like "snakes on a plane," especially when said quickly. In fact, even "Samuel L. Jackson on a plane" sounds a little like "snakes on a plane" if you say it quickly while mumbling.
I needed a down day, so after we got up, Gretchen set out on her own to explore the "old" part of Hamburg, which began several blocks to the north of the harbor neighborhood where our hotel happened to be. As for me, there was no coffee in our room. But there were a few tea bags and a way to make boiling hot tea water, so I managed to cobble together an acceptable morning, making a breakfast of cashews and other nuts that we'd bought with Delta airlines vouchers back at JFK. Occasionally I'd look out on the square below, where someone had set up crude little nooks made of old wooden pallets painted different colors. A woman was reading in one and a couple construction workers were chatting and maybe smoking in another. (People in Germany still smoke like it's the 1990s if not the 1980s.)
Gretchen returned at around 1:00pm after an enjoyable self-guided tour and we then checked out of our hotel. At that point the plan was to rent bikes and ride over to where our riverboat was docked (53.52838N, 9.96477E). We'd both installed Lime apps on our phones, and the apps were telling us about available bikes left by previous riders nearby. But when we got to one of the bikes, it was unclear how to unlock it and begin the ride. There was a cable keeping the back wheel from rotating, and it refused to let go even after the app on Gretchen's phone seemed to indicate that the ride had begun. So then she tried to end the ride, only to be informed by the app that she was truying to park the bicycle in an unsuitable location. It was a Kafkaesque trap of somehow renting an unusable bicycle while simultaneously not being abe to end the rental. Thinking perhaps we might be at the wrong bike, we went searching for others, but there were none. As you can imagine, Gretchen wasn't taking this very well and she proceeded to have a full-bore meltdown, the likes of which I hadn't seen awhile. Mercifully, at some point the app said (in its usual infuritating, understatedly cheerful way) that Gretchen appeared to be having trouble with getting her bike to work so the rental would be ended automatically.
But now what? There were no other Lime bikes nearby. But there were a couple Lime electric scooters. "But I was hoping to get some exercise!" Gretchen said unironically when I suggested taking those instead. "Look, we don't have a lot of choice," I pointed out. This time, unlocking went as one would expect, and the scooters seemed to work. Gretchen had never ridden one before, so I had to give her a little crash course. Fortunately, though, electric scooters are about the simplest powered vehicles in existence, and it took only about fifteen seconds to tell her about the existence of the throttle and the brake. Soon were were flying down the bike lanes towards Hamburg's new container port. Being lighter than me, Gretchen tended to go faster at full throttle than I did, and I worried about her leaving me in the dust, something that wouldn't've been a problem had she periodically checked to see if I was still behind her. But that's just not something she does, either in situations like this or when, say, walking beside her father while I'm back with her mother (because I'm worried about her mother, what with her various artificial joints, being left in the dust). Eventually, though, at a stop sign I warned Gretchen about the danger of her speed advantage and she drove her scooter more slowly.
Somewhere on our way, Gretchen's navigation wanted us to cross St. Pauli Hafenstraße to somehow get across the Elbe, though it was unclear how that would happen. So we decided to just follow a young woman on a bicycle who looked to be doing what we needed to do. This led us to a glass-walled elevator giving us an unusually good view of the elevator mechanisms it took us down into the ground. At the bottom the air was cool and we stood at the entrance to a tunnel so long that it converged on a mathematical point. This was the Elbtunnel, a tunnel bored beneath the Elbe early in the 20th Century. It's about 1200 feet long, and as we traveled its length on our electric scooters, it was exhilarating. At the other end, Gretchen declared that what we'd just done was the most fun she'd ever had. Mind you, she'd been having a complete meltdown less than 20 minutes earlier.
At the other end of the tunnel, another elevator took us to the surface, disgorging us into an unlovely industrial site resembling a depopulated second season of the Wire. From there, we fought the wind on our scooters until we'd made it to the dock where our riverboat, the Swiss Ruby, was docked. At that point it was time to end our scooter rides. It was here that we ran into a major problem with renting scooters. For starters, my crappy cellphone had trouble finding an open WiFi hotspot to communicate with the cloud, which is necessary to end any scooter ride. But even Gretchen was having trouble, as the app was telling her that she wasn't supposed to park her scooter where she was trying to park it, which was a bike parking area that already contained a couple scooters from a competitor. And it wouldn't allow her to end the ride until the scooter was in a suitable place. But where that was was left unsaid. If you can't just park your rental scooter anywhere and your app never gives you a map of where you can park it, then it becomes a guessing game as to where to end the damn ride. If one is in a time crunch (which in this case, we weren't), this kind of thing would be next-level infuriating. I was starting to understand why so many rental scooters were ending up flung into Puget Sound. Gretchen's solution to this problem was to uninstall the app and walk away as if annulling the whole ride. I didn't feel comfortable making such a rough break with Lime, particularly given the possibility of fines being added to the expense of the rental. So I made a few forrays to a nearby place about 100 feet away where I could get a WiFi signal and, in stages, ended my ride. But Lime didn't make it easy. It first told me that I was parking it in a forbidden zone, though for me they for some reason allowed me to override that notice. Then they wanted me to upload a photo of it parked, something that required either more bandwidth than I could cobble together or that I somehow have WiFi from a place close enough to the scooter to snap a photo. After several photo uploads were deemed unacceptable, the fucking app finally gave me the option of "upload anyway." With that, my Lime nightmare was finally over. I then boarded the Swiss Ruby, which Gretchen had already done some fifteen minutes ago.
I found Gretchen up on the top sun deck with our Scottish friends Kelly & Brian. There was some sort of screw-up with the Swiss Rose onboarding (or whatever it is called, though that seems like maybe a nautical term that has been adapted for more general use by HR departments worldwide) and nobody had yet been allowed into their cabins. Not only that, but there was no food or even water. The arriving passengers, some of whom had been led to believe that there would be some sort of lunch waiting for them, were left to fend for themselves Lord of the Flies stylee. Was this cruise going to be a Fyre-Festival-grade shit show? Fortunately for us, Gretchen still had a bunch of snacks from our voucher purchases back at JFK, though unfortunately some of them had gone a bit stale despite being sealed in plastic (especially the oriental snack mix). We crunching on those, we talked some more about Miniatur Wunderland as well as the wacky not-very-good art on the walls back at their AirBnB.
Eventually, though, after an hour or so, we were told we could come get our cabin keys and move our shit into our rooms. At that point we realized that the Swiss Ruby was an old cruise ship. Instead of having card access to our rooms, we had to use physical keys. Our room was small and the bathroom tiny, and there was a large crack in the wall, suggesting some sort of maritime accident in the Swiss Ruby's past. I was very happy to be carrying two working European-to-American wall plug adapters, as, unlike on more modern vessels, there were no American-style plugs anywhere in our room (or on the ship, for that matter).
This evening we went to the welcoming ceremony, where we sipped free drinks and were introduced to the crew. After that, we went down into the one dining room and sat at the rearmost starboard table with Kelly and Brian as well as Simon and Cathy, our favorite couple from the Portugal cruise last November. Insinuating himself among us was a seventh person named Dave whom Gretchen had found immediately unlikeable, mostly because all he wanted to talk about was vegan-activism-related. (Gretchen considers herself a vegan activist, but when she is with her vegan friends, she wants to talk about other things.) Unlike on other cruises, alcohol on this one was not free, not even at meals. So I immediately formed a wine-bottle-buying alliance with Brian, where he bought a bottle to share with me tonight and I would buy one tomorrow. (The others at our table either didn't drink or were making other arrangements.)
Pallets made into crude hangout cubicles in the square below our hotel, complete with portable palm trees that would have to be put away before the arrival of winter.
Click to enlarge.
In the amazing Elbtunnel.
Click to enlarge.
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