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Hafencity
Saturday, September 7 2024
location: cabin 105, Swiss Ruby river boat, Hamburg, Germany
I was at breakfast a little before Gretchen and was joined at the frontmost port table in the dining room by a mousey Swedish woman and her mother. Not long after that, Gretchen joined us. I took advantage of the free-flowing coffee as best I could, since, unlike on other cruise ships, there was no public cappuccino machine. But the coffee wasn't very good. Gretchen only drinks decaf, which was great for her because it meant every cup she ordered had to be made fresh from the coffee robot back in the kitchen.
Last night at dinner, the food had been pretty good, but something had been a bit off, starting with the bread. It had looked good, but the waiters were unusually stingy with it and it didn't feel good in the mouth. Gretchen immediately identified the problem: it was gluten-free. This problem extended to the pasta in the spaghetti main course, which was unnecessarily brittle and didn't have a good mouthfeel. This morning at breakfast, the bread all continued to have this problem. Clearly someone had made a rather common mistake: assuming all vegans are also gluten free. Perhaps vegans are as annoying as people who are gluten-free, but (except for those who are both vegan and gluten-free), their concerns are entirely different. True vegans, a subset of people who eat a certain way for non-selfish reasons, care about animals or perhaps the environment. Gluten, meanwhile, is a plant product. People who are concerned about gluten are motivated entirely for selfish reasons. Sometimes those reasons make sense, as is the case when one is allergic to gluten. But those reasons are still selfish, which is why the gluten-free are rarely evangelical about their diet. And nobody is gluten-free out of concern for wheat plants or the land where wheat is grown.
The prospect of spending a week on a boat being forced for no good reason to eat nothing by gluten-free wheat products (especially in a land like Germany so famous for the quality of its breads) was infuriating and also a bit infantilizing, especially for a foodie like Gretchen. This cruise was, we imagined, a safe space for vegans, not some Kafkaesque exercise in dietary Venn diagram overlap. None of the other cruises by this same company had imposed a vegan-free diet on us, so what the fuck was going on? So this morning after breakfast, Gretchen brought this up with the woman who seemed to be the head of the non-navigation crew of the ship. The woman confirmed that the bread on the boat was all gluten-free, but then made the absurd contention that the problem with bread with gluten in it was that it was nearly always non-vegan. This is, of course, completely untrue. In fact, to make gluten-free bread palatable, often eggs and other animal-derived ingredients are added.
Immediately after breakfast, Gretchen and I joined an excursion that would be taking another boat into the old Hamburg harbor, disgorging some of us (including Gretchen and me) and then we'd have a walking tour of the old harbor neighborhood, which has experienced the largest urban renewal project in all of Europe. As we walked from the Swiss Ruby to the excursion boat, Gretchen struck up a conversation with the cruise director, a youngish woman named Swanz (who was standing in for Dirk, the gentleman who founded the company and has been the cruise director of all the other cruises we've been on with ths vegan cruise company). Gretchen mentioned the untenable (and frankly embarrassing) situation with gluten, and Svanz seemed to be picking up what Gretchen was laying down.
On the excursion, we learned that the part of the harbor we'd been in since crossing the Elbe in the Elbtunnel is a brand new one created specifically to handle containerized freight, an innovation that came in the 1960s. Before that, stevedores unloaded boats sack by sack or in some cases shovel-load by shovel-load. There were machines to help with the work, and much technology had been put into making the process efficient. But it was still labor intensive and slow in a way that handling containerized shipments never is. Because of the new containerized port, the old Hamburg port fell into decay in the 1970s, a situation that continued until the early 2000s, when a huge effort at urban renewal was initiated. The result has been a retrofit of many old harbor warehouses, which now house other businesses and perhaps residences. Some of the more dilapidated buildings were torn down and replaced with dazzling new architecture, much of it fairly low-rise. (There are no truly tall buildings in Hamburg, a legacy of a law that required nothing be taller than the clock faces of churches, traditionally the only way that the workers could determine the time.) The most stunning renovation of all has been to an big old warehouse in the old port that used to process cacao. It has been gut-remodeled, with a tall glass crown of wildly undulating glass to create the new home for the Hamburg Philharmonic. According to our excusion guide (a youngish woman named Sarah with a Lemmy wart and impressive cankles), that specific renovation came to a billion euros. Several old-style cranes, the kind from the pre-containerization era, had been left in place beside it as a nod to its past.
Our excursion boat let us off near the Philharmonic building and then we walked into the heart of the revitalized harbor (a neighborhood called Hafencity). Along the way, we passed a playground full of wild and innovative play equipment of the sort that would've been seared into my memory had I experienced it as a six year old. Here, Sarah the excursion guide told us that Hafencity has a children's council that meets periodically to make decisions regarding things like playgrounds. One of the things that those children had apparently stressed was the need for water in their playgrounds. So the playground included a large shallow pond that appeared to have a floor of tile. It looked kind of nasty, but there was a kid in it having a blast.
Sarah eventually led us to the square overlooked by the 25 Hour Hotel we'd slept in the night before last and there turned us loose to go shopping if we wanted. Gretchen and I took the opportunity to use the bathroom at the hotel, trying to shake a somewhat annoying woman from our cruise who claimed to be from Marina del Rey and wanted to natter on about rescuing dogs from kill shelters.
From there, we passed some old warehouses that used to process raw coffee beans from the boats. According to Sarah, they did so in a sort of vertical assembly line, winching the bags of beans off barges up to the top, sorting them, roasting them one level down, maybe grinding them another level lower, and finally packaging them and loading them on trucks waiting on the non-harbor side of the building.
We ended up in a large room with a big scale model of Hafencity, though there were representations of a few things beyond it, such as the ruins of a church whose spire had survived Allied bombing. Then the tour abruptly ended, and Gretchen was disappointed, saying it had initially been billed as a walking tour of old Hamburg as well as a more of boat ride even for those doing the walking part of the tour. On the way back to the excursion boat, we went into a gift shop for the philharmonic and I bought a philharmonic-branded teeshirt for about 25 euros to supplement the meagre wardrobe I'd brought with me, which amounted to: a pair of long pants, two pairs of shorts, two teeshirts, and two sweaters (Gretchen thought those last two items were ridiculous given the summery weather, but I had a feeling that could all change in an instant in central Europe).
It was lunchtime back on the Swiss Ruby, and the problem of gluten-free bread had been entirely fixed. Suddenly it seemed like all the bread had gluten, and if anyone was gluten-free, their celebration was ending with a dramatic record scratch. This indicated that there were already big stores of gluten-rich bread on the boat and that all that had to happen was for someone to cut away the police tape or whatever was securing the doorway to access it.
Our boat finally started making its way up the Elbe sometime this afternoon, and before long were were passing the regularly jetties that line its bank, presumably to protect it from erosion (perhaps from all the barge traffic).
This evening, the six of us in our clique (including Kelly, Brian, Simon, and Cathy, but not Dave) were all in the large rearmost starboard booth. Cathy and Simon had gone into town and bought a bottle of cheap (two or three euro) wine and used it to fill the 25 euro bottle they'd bought last night at dinner. This allowed them to bring last night's bottle back totally full in a way that suggested they'd begun it at an earlier meal, thereby having wine for dinner but only paying a few euro from it. It was exactly the kind of hack I like filling my life with, and it was no surprise it was devised by a British couple. But until we had a bottle of our own to fill with cheap wine, we had to buy another 25 euro bottle to have our own dinner wine. I had remembered this time to bring one of my ghost peppers to dinner, and it helped give a little zing to my dinner (though it would've been excellent without it). Simon and Cathy are adventurous people and they wanted to try a ghost pepper themselves. So I gave them each pieces that were about a quarter the size of a match head. They took a taste and were like, "Holy fuck, is that ever hot!" Such peppers are never encountered in restaurants and would be rare-to-nonexistent in Europe, so I'd brought them an experience they might not have ever had in a lifetime.
Later up in the lounge, our little clique (with the exception, for some reason, of Brian) formed a team in a boat-wide game of trivia. In keeping with earlier such games, the questions were generally so obscure that all we could do was guess at the answers. And a lot of them, for some reason, were about Vietnam (the setting of another of the vegan riverboat cruises). There was one question our team should've known, since it included two college-educated Yanks: when was the Emmancipation Proclamation issued? I thought maybe it was 1861, though Gretchen thought 1863. It turns out she was right, but we would've put down 1861 had I not cheated and covertly done a Google search. Despite our diversity of knowledge, our team didn't even place amongst the top three playing tonight in the lounge.
Starlings on high-voltage wires in Hamburg's new port.
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Container cranes in the new Hamburg harbor near where the Swiss Ruby was docked.
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An interesting large sailing vessel in the new Hamburg port.
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One of the fun kid-designed buildings in the playground.
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A kid playing in the shallow playground pond.
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Weed flowers in the foreground with some fun urban renewal architecture in the background.
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Our excursion guide Sarah (in yellow) addresses our group in front of an old building in Hafencity. Note those cankles!
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That guy Dave who sat with us last night at dinner with his left elbow up, somehow making a seated old woman in the background look like a scaled-down doll.
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The old Hamburg Fish Market from our excursion boat.
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The new home of the Hamburg Philharmonic. Note the old pre-containerization cranes.
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Various old spires rising behind Hafencity, including a blackened old ruin remnant after Allied bombing.
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A bad thatched roof on an old building along the Elbe.
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