Hamburg, while technically a port city, is about 100 kilometers from the open sea. The river Elbe is its vital connection to the North Sea, a main thoroughfare for ships for trade and leisure. Hamburg brands itself as das Tor zur Welt (“the gate to the world”), a reminder of its heydays as a major player in the Hanseatic League.

By Evgeniya Koptyug

The Hanseatic city usually makes a quiet impression on a Sunday morning. But not on November 28, 2010. I board the subway in the rural North of Hamburg, still a whole half hour away from downtown. And suddenly it’s loud and lively: the train is full of excited and foremost very much awake passengers.“It’s a benefit Ballett-Werkstatt, right?” one lady asks her companion. “Yes, and at the end there will be a book signing!” answers the other. It’s funny and gratifying to listen to these enthusiastic conversations around me, since I’m an intern at the HAMBURG BALLET. The mood is unavoidably contagious. On arrival at the State Opera I am almost bursting with curiosity and anticipation.

Rathausmarkt at Christmas: stunning (Flickr: mawel)

The British pub crawl is a much maligned thing. Probably because the word “crawl” implies that the participants are unable to walk between pubs, the pub crawl is generally interpreted by British people as an excuse to get absolutely hammered, and is therefore associated by our European neighbors with nothing more than drunkenness and debauchery of the worse, most British kind.

Yet as Brit living in Germany, I can point to a shining example of how the British Pub Crawl can actually contribute to rather than irreparably damage relations between my fair home country and our long-suffering continental neighbors. How do I manage this amazing feat of social integration? What glue do I use to make this diametrically opposed… er, thing stick? Well, it’s a mixture of mulled wine, cinnamon-flavored goodies and the Spirit of Yuletide itself.

Calendars – different in every country (Flickr: Eichental)

Monday was an odd day this week. Firstly, I noticed during breakfast that my girlfriend was still there, smiling across the table at me and drinking tea – which is odd given that she works full-time a good two hundred clicks south of Hamburg. Secondly, when I rang a service hotline trying to sort out some annoying computer issues, I got an even more annoying answering machine telling me that the call center in question was closed.