During vacation I went up to Hamburg for a visit, and to pickup my good college friend Briana, who flew over from Maine for a week.It was wonderful to see her again and share quality time together.We stayed in Hamburg for the first three days, which was quite fun.We saw lots of our Hamburg friends and had many good meals – and conversations!Hamburg has three rivers, the most famous being the Elbe, the second-most-famous being the Alster, and the third (and now practically non-existent) is the Bille.The Alster is dammed, and has been since a miller built the dam at least more than a hundred years ago (I’m not so brushed-up on my Hamburg history).This dam has created two beautiful lakes, one called the Binnenalster (Inner Alster) and one called the Außenalster (Outer Alster).When Briana and I studied in Hamburg for a year we would meet on the docks by the Außenalster for our weekly “Alsterchats.”These weekly updates and reality checks (or moments of checking out of reality) helped us pull through our second semester there and find the true beauty Hamburg, and life, has to offer.Needless to say, at our last Alsterchat Briana and I were pretty low.But I promised her that someday we would be back togetherAnd guess what?We made it through one last year at Smith with much more sporadic Alsterchat replacements (though the ones on the docks by our Paradise Pond were close) and then all of a sudden, there we were:both of us together on the Alster docks again, enjoying a beautiful (sunny!) day in Hamburg.
We also made a couple trips downtown (the first was cut short on Briana’s first afternoon because of jet lag).During one of our more
successful trips we entered Bärentreff on the Mönckebergstraße (Hamburg’s main shopping drag).This store is not devoted to teddy bears, but instead to all things gummy.Briana said that for her, no German train trip is complete without gummies.And since we would take the train to Dresden that weekend, we used it as an excuse to go in.I’d only been in once before, and gladly accepted the free samples I remembered they gave out.Our first sample was of “Gummiautos,” which we promptly decided we had to buy.A 500-gram package set us back about 2.50Euros, which seems pricey but if you consider that they use only fruit juices and natural – or no – food colorings (no bad “E” food dies!) it is quite worth it to enjoy a juicy, colorful, sweet “delicacy.”And that we did: on our way to Dresden we traded off popping little cars, convertibles, pick-ups, and busses (accompanied by tasty Ritter Sport chocolate bars).The gummies almost made us not care that the train was running late. We laughed when the conductor apologized saying the delay was caused by “construction workers on the tracks” and a little girl, maybe five years old, said to her mom “Aber Mama, ich sehe keine Bauarbeiter!” (“But Mom, I don’t see any construction workers!”)The dear little girl expressed what we all had on our minds!While the Deutsche Bahn will continue to come up with excuses for their inaccuracies, I will simply delight in little Gummiautos and enjoy my good company in peace.It certainly beats driving on the Autobahn.
Bärentreff can be found in Hamburg on the Mönckebergstraße.It and its partner stores can be visited online at www.fruchtgummis.de