Hamburg’s Night Out – a Flâneurian Experience

Out of boringness and depression state of mind and heart, me and a couple of friends spontaneously went to Hamburg yesterday. We went there with a car (Hamburg is less than an hour by car from Lübeck) and arrived around 8.30pm under drizzling rain.

We went to a Pakistani restaurant somewhere around Hamburg Altona and there we were joined by two other friends and together we enjoyed a very good dinner. It was an awesome dinner, well, it basically just about my taste of culinary, lots of spices and stuff.

We finished dinner around 11pm so we decided to get a taste of the urban’s night life since we’ve been living in Lübeck for a while (Well, Lübeck itself is urban but compare to Hamburg, it’s just different, big different). So we went to Reeperbahn, the place for night life in Hamburg.

It was a crazy experience =). As we walked down the street we’ve seen a lot (I really do mean a lot) of people walking around (it’s already midnight), almost all the store were still open and not to mention a lot of people running and driving around waving Greece’s flag (because Greece just beat France in the Euro 2004 soccer championship). After been a while living in the calm Lübeck, finding myself in the middle of a busy night life really give me some certain energy. I was growing up in a very big city, life is never quiet in Jakarta, so it was fantastic just walking around surrounding by people and feel the vibe, feel the energy flow from the people and feel those energy and vibe recharge every cell inside me.

To my surprise there are a lot of, I really hate to use this word because I found this word really degrading them as human =(, prostitutes standing at the sidewalk and they really offering themself to the people that were walking around, including us. Some of them are really nice, good looking girl and even all of my friends (one German, one Canadian and one Indian) are quite surprise also to find that those girl are, again I hate to say this, selling themselves for money (or else, who am I to judge?). Anyway, it was a quite shocking experience to find out about the people that involve in the transaction of flesh…

So yeah, the visit to Reeperbahn is not complete without visiting the red light area, right? The transaction of pleasure of the flesh, as I always said, is always a part of human civilization since the beginning. Well, it’s not Amsterdam, but still walking down the red light district is always give me some chill. Window shopping have a different meaning in the red light district. As a person that always value people by their mind and intellegence I guess I could never understand why people can just use their body and looks to make other people appreciate them. Not that I am not enjoying looking at good looking girl but still this spectacle really not so easy understandable for me.

After we finished our strolling at the red light district, we stopped by at a bar to get a drink. Just to chill out a little bit and try to catch a second wind. Then we continue our strolling around this city part again. “After one drink, red light disctrict looks quite different, eh”