Anniversary Celebration: Canoeing the Alster

For the second weekend of our anniversary extravaganza, we decided to go canoeing on the northern part of the Alster lake.  We had been wanting to do so from the very beginning, and we thought our anniversary would be a great time to do it.  The area of the lake we were at is the part that you can see from the park that I talked about in this post.

A strange thing happened while we were on the metro, on our way there.  When we got on the train we saw a whole bunch of people dressed in 70's garb, with neon colors, bell bottoms, fake flowers and afro wigs.  Then, more would get on at each stop!!!  It's always so amusing being in a foreign country because things that this happen and you're just so confused.  You never find out what is going on like you would if you spoke the language.  I think it's how babies must feel.  Anyway, our guess is that they were headed to some big music convention, because they all got off at the Reeperbahn stop, where (among other things) there are always big rock concerts, etc.  

Kept meaning to take pictures of Hamburg from the metro, but only took one or two.

Unfortunately, a lot of the photos I took at the beginning of our excursion are overexposed, because I thought the camera was in AV mode, but it was in manual.  But, you can still kind of tell what the dock, where we rented the canoe, looked like from the photo below, while I have made into b&w.

  

The canoeing itself was great.  We went through all these different little...riverlets (?)...canals (?) that run off from the lake.  We went under bridges...

Passed by some kids and their dog spending a lazy summer day on the banks...

And nearly got plowed over by a ferry (and actually saw a ferry hit someone - don't worry, they were ok).

The trees along the sides were lovely.

As were the houses.

After rowing through the little alleyways, we made our way back out to the open water of the lake.  By this time though, it had started to drizzle.  I was thoroughly enjoying it, but Tom did not feel the same, so headed back to the dock after a thoroughly delightful excursion.

Isn't Hamburg charming?