Day four 

Wednesday March 2

Mark:

Like we did in Berlin, we’re thinking that any night we don’t get a gig, we could take ourselves off to an open mic somewhere, but we have a look today and discover there isn’t a single one happening tonight. And that list of 20 plus that we found, on closer look, we discover that nearly all of them happen only once or twice a month. Or, in one case, four times a year. So it really isn’t as abundant as it first appeared. And of course, Corona and all that, the list is hopelessly out of date. Totally understandably so, but yeah. So many of them aren’t happening anymore, or the places have closed down, or not opened yet. And that is really what’s happening right now. And again, we kinda knew it when coming. Hamburg isn’t really open until this weekend and we’re starting to see that it’s really mainly a weekend city anyway, or at least that’s how it’s currently operating.

Today’s the day to go out and see if we can find somewhere to park the car for free. We go and rescue it from the paid parking we’ve had it in since we got here and set off for the outer suburbs of Hamburg. Here, Maja decides to follow the route of the overground S Train so that we can hopefully be near a train station when we do eventually find parking. We also use the drive as an opportunity to take a detour or two and check out areas where we know certain venues are. What we discover is that, apart from the Reeperbahn where we’re staying, bars and venues are very sporadically spread about the city. We’re gonna go check the city centre later too, but with that being quite close to where we are, we can now see that we really are ideally situated and probably won’t have to travel too much for gigs. We also see that there’s going to be no point coming out to these areas to hustle and can’t now either because, yes of course, everywhere’s closed.

It takes a while, but we do find our parking space then jump on a nearby train to go check out the city centre which sits in the middle of a whole bunch of sea channels, so bridges and river-looking things all over the place. And while the Reeperbahn is nothing but bars of various description and a few shops, here there are hardly any bars or venues and we’ve found the place where you can buy things that aren’t food. We start to think about walking back and seeing what we can find barwise to possibly hustle on the way but we come to the conclusion that there probably won’t be anything, so as we reach the edge of the city we jump on the train and head back. Totally confirmed. For hustling, the only place to be is the Reeperbahn.