The annual lad’s trip in March 2011 returned to the fair country of Germany, this time to Hamburg. The city has had its fair share of travails over the centuries, great fires, cholera outbreaks, carpet bombing in WW2 and even a significant flooding in the 60’s which took many lives. It is now a modern cosmopolitan city that it is probably the most touristy place we have visited on our trips.
As we boarded the plane, there was a huge group of lads dotted around in the seats heading out on a stag day, I can’t remember the chap’s name so for simplicity let’s call him Smithy.
We arrived about mid-afternoon on the Friday and passed through the Hauptbahnhof main station en route. Much to our infantile amusement there were posters for Shaun Das Schaf (Shaun the Sheep) and Rory das Automobile (Rory the Racing Car) which we chortled about over the weekend!
Directly from the hotel we bounced into the first bar we passed whilst heading into the centre of the city. The mein host, on hearing our accents smiled and proceeded to open a back room and ushered us in for us to discover that it was full of dubious war paraphernalia.
To increase our discomfort, he then proceeded to boot up the jukebox and put the ‘Sink the Bismarck’ track on! We made plans to escape after a quick beer, but due to a communication breakdown we ended up having to have another drink there. It was rapidly turning into a strange start to the weekend.
The centre of town was a little tacky to be fair and Smithy’s stag boys were spotted in the Reeperbahn area. Within that area was the Hamburg Reeperbahn Academy situated on Hans-Albers-Platz.
We wandered in and discovered that were was a function room behind the bar which served as a disco, nightclub and live venue and stayed open to the eye-popping time of 7am. They regularly have original or covers bands playing. The place had a decent vibe to it and a band called Darryl and Pals were on stage when we attended.
Directly next door was another bar called the Hamburg Ranch House which we pottered into and saw an act called Wild Touch who were apparently a regular band on the local circuit since 2004.
The overriding news story of the weekend was the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima in Japan. Around this time, I kept harking back to the prophetic line of Billy Bragg of ‘And the incident at Tschernobyl proves the world we live in is very small’ from his 1986 track ‘Help Save the Youth of America’.
On Day 2, we made a visit to one of Europe’s most famous football teams St Pauli’s stadium, located in the dock area of the city. They are arguably recognised more for their unique social culture than their football and they are quantified as one of ‘Kult’ clubs. They generate a strong affinity from supporters far and wide due to their commendable left-wing politics and have distinctive skull and crossbones on their merchandise.
Nearby to the ground we found a superb pub, arguably one of the best bars I have ever been into which we christened the ‘St Pauli Bar’ as I cannot recall the actual name. The nearest musical comparison to the St Pauli ethos would be punk and ska and this was booming over the sound system and the clientele had such character and there was a nice modicum of ‘edge’ to the place.
St Pauli had just recently managed to gain promotion to the Bundesliga, the highest division, where they were now playing their city rivals Hamburger SV in the Hamburger Stadtderby. I was chatting to a genial local lad who had attended the derby only twenty-three days earlier where they had remarkably beaten their much bigger rivals in their home stadium, this was locally such a big deal that he was almost in tears while reciting the memories of the match.
To grab a local comparison, it would be on the scale of Stockport reaching the topflight and going on to win at Man City or Man United. We spent a terrific couple of hours in this establishment. When we boarded the flight home the next day, it was abundantly clear that Smithy’s stag do crew had been pushing the envelope all weekend and they were literally shells of their former selves!
The St Pauli bar is called The Jolly Rodger, I’ve been in many time since .That was indeed a great trip.
Thanks Jez I could not for the life of me remember the name!
I will have to give the Jolly Roger a go