On Friday, May 20, 2016, I met four Swiss guests at the Mövenpick Hotel on Sternschanze. With an engineer and an architect, this city tour turned out to be an “educational” tour for me in terms of architecture. Many thanks at this point! I learned a lot about statics and the challenges facing architects! We had planned four hours for our individual city tour in Hamburg. The fact that it ended up being five was due to our coffee break in Deichstraße and our stop to try Franzbrötchen. And, of course, my guests’ thirst for knowledge. After a short walk from Schanzenpark through the northern part of Planten un Blomen, we marveled at the beautiful buildings in the Colonnaden and made our way to Jungfernstieg. Both streets got their names for a reason. The Jungfernstieg never goes unmentioned in Hamburg’s highlights. After more information about the Alster river and its division into the Inner and Outer Alster, we reached Hamburg City Hall and took a closer look at it before taking a look at the stock exchange through the inner courtyard.
We were just a stone’s throw away from the Old Town Hall and the House of the Patriotic Society, where we talked about patronage today and back then in Hamburg. Every tour guide in Hamburg explains the firestorm during the Second World War with the St. Nikolai memorial. Naturally, as a qualified tour guide in Hamburg, I did not withhold this information from my guests. As the weather was not quite so kind to us and we had to contend with drizzle and a chilly wind, we spontaneously decided to stop off at a café. The Kolonialwaren-Café in the historic Deichstraße was a “cozy” place to warm up.
Our individual city tour then took us to Hamburg’s Speicherstadt, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2015. There, my guests learned why the Speicherstadt was built, what makes it so special and what it was originally used for. From the ancient warehouses, we continued our tour through Hamburg’s newest district, HafenCity. Vespucci, Magellan, Marco Polo – my guests quickly realized that the focus here is on explorers. The Elbphilharmonie is also on the list of “must-sees” and we studied it in detail – including in the Elbphilharmonie pavilion. Today’s modern explorers dock at the HafenCity cruise terminal, which we inspected next to the Unilever headquarters. 
We then took the new subway line towards St. Michael’s Church. The largest baroque church in northern Germany impressed us with its copper-covered tower and bright, renovated interior. The Gruner & Jahrs building also immediately caught the eye of the architect and engineer. A reason to report on Hamburg as a media city. A quick tip for the evening fish and a fleeting glance at the Landungsbrücken marked the end of our completely individual city tour.
