Surprise! Your train is boarding a large boat. This would surprise you, no? Well, it surely surprised me. I suppose I didn’t pay very close attention to the route we’d be taking, or I would have noticed the large body of water my train needed to cross to get from Denmark to Germany. In any case, that’s what happened today during my four-plus hour journey to the industrial hub that is Hamburg.

After the announcement that we’d be boarding a ferry to make the border crossing, our train pulled slowly right into the belly of a massive ship, and we were asked to leave our train behind and wander the boat. Three levels of the boat were for automobiles and trains, while the top three floors were passenger decks. The crossing took about an hour. During that time, I wandered the decks, looking out of the interior windows on the first of the passenger levels at a few points, but mostly just feeling the pretty powerful breeze on the top two (exterior) decks. Other ships passed us, some of them ferries like our own. A seagull glided along with our boat, matching our speed precisely for a good ten minutes.

Welcome to Haburg Hauptbahnhof

I arrived at my big, chain hostel tonight at about five, and I’m just relaxing for the evening. A long-ish travel day followed six hours of walking yesterday (18,000+ steps, according to my magic phone), so I’m packing it in until I leave for Dresden in the morning. I was struck again this morning, especially as I approached the Copenhagen train station, just how many people there ride their bikes everywhere. Hopefully, I get to return to that beautiful city soon. I would make a solid effort to learn Danish if I thought I had a chance to live there.

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