Hamburg, Germany

The ship saves time by passing through the Keil Canal, a canal that passes through Germany just south of Denmark. The canal is very close to the second largest city in Germany, which is Hamburg. The Norwegian Dream is the largest ship to pass through the canal and can only do so with two major modifications to the ship to make it short enough to pass under the bridges along the way. I happened to catch one of the modifications, the smokestack flips over!

Rather than stay on the ship and watch it pass through the canal at 8 knots, we took the bus ride into Hamburg to take the Cultural Heritage of Hamburg tour.

We chose the Cultural Heritage of Hamburg tour offered by the ship. It's about an hour drive from the entry to the canal to Hamburg. When we got there we first started with a brief city tour by bus. Unfortunately traffic in the city was pretty slow. We were shown the nice buildings around the harbour and the main highlights.

There is a lake split in two right in the middle of town and the smaller of the lakes was quite scenic. Someone on our bus asked if we were going to stop to walk around there and take pictures. We were told they can't do that and we were then driven around the larger lake. We were shown older historic houses then our first stop was at the blue mosque. Not sure why we stopped here because the mosque wasn't that interesting or historic. We then crossed the street to check out the view of the lake. We were pretty far from anything interesting at this point so there wasn't much to see.

Our next stop was at one of the older churches in town. St. Michael's Church was nice but we did see a couple other interesting churches while driven around that looked worthy of a visit too.

Our last stop was the Kunsthalle Art Museum. There we were quickly shown highlights of the collection. We were given a brief history of European Art. There were some interesting pieces shown but still not the most impressive collection I've seen. The tour operator had an arrangement to allow us to tour the museum after closing hours so it was nice and empty.

The highlight of this excursion was dinner in the restaurant adjacent to the museum. The food was buffet style and German, two major warning signs in my book, but was surprisingly good. At least that was a pleasant surprise.

Overall I wasn't impressed with the tour. We spent a lot more time on the bus than I would have hoped and too little time exploring. I couldn't have skipped the nearly one hour tour of the city by bus and spent more time at the museum or visiting one other historical site. The biggest waste of time was the stop at the far end of the lake near the Blue Mosque. We also found it interesting that a highlight of the bus tour around the city was a drive through the Red Light District.

To get back to the ship we were driven to the other end of the canal where we were expecting our ship to be almost there. Just as we were getting close we were told the ship is going to be nearly an hour late due to traffic on the canal. Instead of sitting at the docs our driver drove us around the little town at that end of the canal. That was a good call because our ship was much more than an hour late and we hung out and the boring docks for almost an hour anyway.

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