Nineteen

Morning of Monday, the 19th day. The plan was to go to Lüneburg, which is a small village outside of Hamburg. The Germans took off school and came with us.

Max's Mom drove us to the Harburg S-Bahn station, which was also where our Regional train left from. The shopping mall in Harburg, the Phoenix Center, was right next door, and that's where Max's mom works. We went into the regional station and hung out for a while before everybody got there.

The train was a 2-deck train, similar to American cities with regional rail. The trip took 20 minutes, through the countryside. We arrived after a short while at a small train station and had to walk for fifteen minutes through the new parts of Lüneburg before we got to the downtown area. Once downtown, Frau and Paul joined us. He had just flown in. The groups split into two groups: the APs went on the German tour, and the German IVs went on the English tour.

Our first stop (about five feet away from the start) was some kind of machinery used to load boats. Lüneburg was always a very rich village (there was also a castle at one point in time) because of its salt. Therefore, it has some very cool architecture (though all the English tour talked about was archetecture- and the special expensive "ropestone" over the doorways of the buildings). We walked around, went in a cathedral, one of five in Lüneburg, and looked at the city hall. Finally, we ended up in the marketplace outside the city hall. We then had a couple of hours of free time.

After hot chocolate in a small shop, the group I was with headed for H&M, so me, John, Nick, and Niklas bailed and wandered around. There really wasn't anything too interesting to do or buy.

Finally, it was time to go to the pool. I'm going to say that this ended up being really fun. It was a lot like the lodge, except the water was warm salt water. There was a wave pool, an outside pool with sprinklers/waterfalls and other cool stuff, and an awesome slide. German pools don't have lifeguards everywhere, but there was an alarm with a motion sensor on the slide that went off if somebody went down before the first was finished. It struck me as being very German to even think of designing something like that.

We were at the pool for three or four hours, which ended up being a bit too much. We walked back to the train station and took 20 minutes to get back to Hamburg. Afterwards, I went to a piano lesson with Max and then to the Beach Club.

The Beach Club is a small club on the river in downtown Harburg- kind of a port/industrial area. Almost everybody went there a lot, but I hadn't been before. There was NOONE there except the totally hammered employee. We played some table soccer and chilled for a while, and then went home.

RwH