A second serving of Hamburg

A ten minute walk from the tourist city centre is the another kind of centre. Grittier; the ground more furnished with cigarette butts and broken bottles. More migrants, especially of black descent, skinny and curly haired. More youths just sitting around on the stone tiles. A stained monument in the centre is surrounded by steps and populated only by men, some sober, some on their way back to Earth. In front of the monument are ornate facades of buildings, still looking grand, now rooms for rent. A man with oversized headphones appears and disappears from a single fourth storey window, surveying the scene below. Pubs, Internet cafes, and seedier kinds of storefronts surround the small square on all sides. Travelers dragging suitcases pass by with regularity. There is no panhandling. No people passed out on the corner. Just a lot of hanging out.

A perfect place to have a sandwich. 

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The Maritime Museum here is one of the most enjoyable I have experienced in a long time. Ten floors of very well organized, well thought out, aesthetically pleasing displays and fascinating content, delivered digestibly. I spent morning until closing there having my imagination tickled, and could have stayed longer. A huge recommendation if ever you find yourself in Hamburg. 

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Adi's little flat is a museum in its own right, adorned with all sorts of books, films, and CDs, organized impeccably. Despite the limited space, there is a plethora of shelves, all filled to the brim. His 58 plus couchsurfers have clearly enjoyed their stays so much that they have all left him gifts, which he categorizes and displays with pride. I contribute a little hand painted boat to his exhibition.

His kitchenette is cozy like the rest of the place, and boxes of various kinds of musli are stacked neatly on top of each other on the floor. That, and fruit juice are the majority of what comprise his diet. 

Adi is an almost perfect specimen of a sinophile. A vast proportion of his surfers are asian women, though he does host the occasional caucasian male. He owns a collection of works by asian authors, and actively watches films from Asia. He has a Japanese-sounding alias on couchsurfing, and has a girlfriend in Bangkok, to whom he is devoted. The only thing he doesn't do is speak an Asian language or eat Asian food. 
When I asked him (very gently) about his preferences, he simply replied 'they have more interesting faces'. When I pointed out that some people might seem interesting on the outside but be quite boring on the inside, and vice versa, he seemed surprised, as if the notion had never before occurred to him. 

Adi is an opportunity to practice openness and going with the flow, no matter how weird. He has the default habit of walking far ahead of me, much farther than conversation can be carried, as well as biking far ahead of me. It's as if conversing has little importance, or his need for personal space is vast. We did manage to have a few interesting talks, but I had to restrain my personal questions. 

On several occasions I texted Adi around 10:30pm to let him know I was going to be back at the flat. As I rounded the corner to his street, I would find him waiting for me in front of the flat, wearing only in a tshirt and briefs in such a manner that you had to ask yourself if he was wearing anything at all on the bottom. 

Thus I would find him, strolling back and forth down the sidewalk in his underwear, slipping back into the flat as soon as he noted that I had seen him. 


Despite this incredibly strange man, I never once felt unsafe or uncomfortable in his presence, and in many ways he was quite courteous, in an old fashioned way. On the morning of my departure, he gifted me with one of his books that I had been browsing through. In the cover was a custom made stamp, as well as a sticky label with all his coordinates, website, email - only a pro (or an obsessive) does this! Then he insisted on coming with me to the bus stop in the early morning, and waited there with me until I boarded, despite a significantly delayed departure. 

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When Adi and I left reviews for each other, as is the practice on couchsurfing, I noticed that he used the same structure for all his reviews, and repeated many of the same phrases to describe his experience with his surfers. That was the piece that made it fit together. Adi is a living template. Everything about him follows some kind of pre-existing structure. There was a rigidity about him and he way he did things that I couldn't put my finger on until now. And when the next surfer comes, the same sequence with a few variations will be repeated. It's like he figured out a formula to fill his need for something - social contact, interest in asians, cycling around town, and has refined it to a point where it's part of his weekly schedule. It's hard to imagine him having friends outside of his couchsurfing guests. 

Would I surf with him again? Probably not. But he was certainly one of the most interesting parts of my time in Hamburg. 

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Next up: How to be a Chinese tourist in Copenhagen