Ultras on the Reeperbahn
Hamburg wasn't in the plans for my foreseeable future travel endeavours but it was somewhere I was interested in exploring at some point in my life. When the deal that me and my girlfriend got came up, I thought 'why not bump it up the list?' And we did just that.
The city has been growing culturally for a while now and is slowly becoming a hotspot within Germany. When boarding the plane, I was filled with intrigue of what I was going to find once the easyJet flight had landed. It was only a short flight away from Manchester Airport meaning my excitement of exploration was only caged up and surrounded by a lot of orange for around one hour and 30 minutes.
Upon arriving in Hamburg and walking through one section of it to get to the hotel, I liked it. It has a friendly and exciting vibe about it, with every building possible having some sort of artistic expression on it in the form of graffiti. Some pieces of art were good, some were the ones you'd typically see on road signs in the UK. Either way, I dig the creative expression across the whole city. It was either graffiti everywhere, or stickers. So no matter what, your property was getting covered in something.
The buildings were attractive. The architecture making a pleasant viewing and providing an alluring feeling for the passers by. An incredible amount of food choices were available, from cultures across the planet. Spanish, Italian, Mexican. Even the McDonalds in Hamburg Airport was fucking incredible. Walking through the city, we kept seeing delightful classic German BMWs and VWs. I loved that.
It's a cultural hotspot when it comes to football with two professional teams occupying the city: HSV and the fascinating St Pauli.
When in the city, we decided to take a trip to the Millertnor, St Pauli's stadium right in the heart of the Sankt Pauli area. A very interesting aura surrounded the place, one that fascinated me. The place is a booming cultural hub of football and creativity. Murals can be seen around the stadiums on walls, stalls and at the time, a fence of graffiti murals was being built which went round one corner of the ground. It's a cool stadium with safe standing on three out of four stands and added business seats into the other. It's pretty remarkable that the stadium only had two little stands around 10 years ago and now it is a full-blown stadium with a museum and corporate boxes.
One interesting thing about the corporate boxes is that they haven't been standardised and the club invited three individual designers in to design each one.
