A Conversation in Hamburg

     I’m beginning to see that all of the best experiences are the ones that sneak up on you.

Hamburg is a cool city, but it wasn’t enough to keep most SASers from heading out to Berlin. I gave it some consideration myself, but I decided to save some money and explore Hamburg instead. I also never made it to a concentration camp, which is something that I fully intended to do in Germany. In the end, Hamburg was everything I needed.

     One afternoon, we came across a small antique shop while wandering through the city. Inside we met a very nice man who asked where we were from. My friend from California answered first and he assumed we were all from the same place. None of us bothered to correct him.

He chattered happily at us in heavily accented English for several minutes before announcing that he really had a lot of work to do. He encouraged us to come to an antique fair the next day. He would have a booth there and he would be happy to see us.

     The next morning we set out in search of this fair, which, when we found it, looked like a series of yard sales all cramped into a large square and overflowing into nearby streets. You could by nearly anything you could ever want at this fair, as long as it was at least twenty years old. We meandered through the stalls for the better part of a morning, picking up this or that, haggling, and taking photos.

When we found his stall, our German friend was very excited to see us.

     “California Princesses!” he yelled. Turning to his customers he said, almost proudly, “They are from California!”

     Oddly enough, our friend from California wasn’t even there.

     We talked for a while and he gave us a really good deal on some of his stuff.

     He talked to us about Syria. He said he sees a lot of people from many different countries, and he really enjoys it. Most people, he pointed out, don’t have anything to do with their government, so you can’t blame them for politics. He hoped America wouldn’t get involved in Syria.

     “As a German, I hate war,” he told us. “Germans hate war. People cannot always agree, but we have to try talking and understanding each other before we turn to war.”

     We couldn’t have met that man anywhere else and I certainly wouldn’t trade our conversation with him for a trip to Berlin. You can’t make things like this happen; you have to let them happen to you.

Some of my favorite pictures from exploring Hamburg: