So there you go: the last match day of the 2010-2011 season has been played, and the 18 Bundesliga teams is divided into two camps – the winners and the losers. Nevertheless, deciding which teams belong to which category is a matter of personal interpretation – and here’s mine.

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.

Photo courtesy Freetaste

Excerpted from a speech YG blogger Andrew gave at an official reception for international students in Hamburg this January. You can read it in full on Andrew’s blog Freetaste.

I am a student from another country, the Philippines to be more precise, and now living in Hamburg.  And like some of you, I struggled or continue to struggle to speak German and to cope with the bitter cold winter.  Like some of you, I like Franzbrötchen mit Streusel, bitte, but have never tried Labskaus.  I can no longer say I am new to Germany.  I first set foot on this country almost four years ago, not here in northern Germany, but down south in the small and beautiful university town of Freiburg, where I pursued my Master’s studies. Back then and up to now, as an international student, I still have the same worries: my visa running out, applying for scholarships, and wondering when I can finally hand in my thesis or dissertation.

Dortmund Hauptbahnhof, a typical German main station (Flickr: das_kine)

One of the first words that British schoolchildren who take German learn is Bahnhof, and very soon after, they are told about the prefix Haupt-: and, badda-bing, badda-bahnhof, you’ve got one of the most important words in the German language, a kind of key to the German soul.

What? A word which, translated, means “main station” – and this is supposed to open the treasure chest of the German psyche? Yes, you got it! Just give me a few minutes, and I’ll show you how.

The center of Hamburg in the summer sun (Flickr photo: Mark Max Henckel)

Apart from its reputation for beautiful blond Nordic girls and debauched nightlife, one of the main reasons I moved to Hamburg is the fact that it is, in my view, one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. And I’m not alone in holding that opinion, as any visitor to Hamburg will soon realize simply by turning on the radio: all local radio stations greet listeners with something akin to the following phrase: “Wir senden live aus Hamburg, schönster Stadt der Welt!” – We’re broadcasting live from Hamburg, the most beautiful city in the world!”

Now, I think you probably have to actually have been born in Hamburg to go quite as far as to claim it is the most attractive urban settlement on the entire planet. I mean, come on guys, ever heard of St. Petersburg? Stockholm? Venice?

Bikes in Hamburg (Flickr: rbrtsch)

As any of you reading from north of an imaginary line drawn between Cologne and Berlin will agree, Germany is often remarkably flat. The northern half of it is essentially part of a pancake that geographers call “The North European Plain.” To the likes of you and me, this essentially means that, between Holland and Russia, you can get a great view just by climbing up the average drainpipe. On a bungalow. With a low roof.

A few weeks back, we all had the not inconsiderable pleasure of an expert explanation of the infamous Berlin dialect, a manner of speaking so reliably confusing to outsiders that even other Germans have their own word for it: berlinern, or “to mumble Berlin slang.” And Berlin is by no means the only German metropolis with its own special way of speaking: residents of Hamburg don’t Deutsch sprechen, for example. No, what Hamburgers do is snacken – and I don’t mean eating meat sandwiches, here.

After a long time at sea, all Hamburg sailors want to do is snack!

Snacken is the way other Germans describe Hamburg’s own peculiar way of distorting standard German. And just like Berlinerisch, it’s a mixture of a characteristic accent, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary imported from older dialectal forms.