How do two Swabians get to Hamburg

30 years in Hamburg

First of all, I have to say that we were both secondary school teachers and worked for 40 years as teachers in the state of Baden-Württemberg.

In 1981, my husband tought his first advanced course in chemistry and nutrition at Heilbronn’s domestic and agricultural school. Normally, teachers and students meet up sporadically after graduating from high school, but they don’t usually become close friends.

Time went on – and through friends in Heidelberg we met a young woman with whom we got on well and who invited us to her wedding in the summer of 1994. Of course, we wanted to know who the lucky future husband was – his surname was very unusual, and my husband then said that he had once taught a student with the same name in an advanced course many years ago – and it turned out to be the groom’s sister.

Andrea studied architecture in Münster and Berlin after graduating from high school and was now working as an architect in Hamburg. We met again at the wedding and she invited us to come and visit her by the Elbe and Alster. This first visit in the fall of 1994 developed into a good friendship, so that from then on, we visited Hamburg practically every year and came to love and appreciate the city more and more.

Andrea is a resolute woman who was always happy to take us to her building sites in the HafenCity-district, which was just being built on Sandtorkai at the time. We explored the shells of the buildings and were always able to enjoy an excellent view from the top floors of the buildings and watch the hustle and bustle of hundreds of thousands of visitors on the streets below.

In the fall of 2004, the idea suddenly arose that we could buy an apartment in Hamburg that was intended as an investment and for renting out. However, a property in the HafenCity-district didn’t really appeal to us: on the one hand, the prices were already astronomically high at the time, and on the other hand, there was hardly any infrastructure in the newly developed area 20 years ago (which has of course changed today). In addition, we are both geographers, so we were also worried about what would happen if the “Blanke Hans” were to strike (meaning a storm flood)scour – as a geographer, you usually have a lot more respect for nature than the average person because you simply know more about it.

But we couldn’t let go of the “HH real estate project”, so we ordered a subscription to the weekend edition of the Hamburger Abendblatt and scoured the real estate listings. It was a particular disadvantage that the newspaper didn’t arrive in our letterbox until the following Monday at the earliest and the current real estate market had probably already dried up by then. But as fate would have it, an advertisement appealed to us, as did the dossier for the corresponding apartment – and in April 2005 we went to the notary at Niendorfer Markt. After that, the apartment in beautiful Harvestehude was rented out and we never thought of moving to Hamburg ourselves.

But we had a change of heart: in February 2014, we had the idea of living in the Hamburg apartment right on Isemarkt ourselves after we retired. No sooner said than done! We made meticulous preparations to move into this beautiful old apartment, had it renovated and bought the furniture. At Easter 2016, the time had finally come – we moved to Hamburg and have felt right at home ever since. We haven’t given up the “little house” in Swabia and have been commuting “like nomads” between the banks of the Neckar and the Alster every month for almost 9 years now.

Now, when you live here in Hamburg, you can’t go to the opera, the ballet, the museum, the movies or shopping 24 hours a day. My husband immediately signed up to a renowned rowing club on the Alster … and thanks to this rowing club, a whole network of strong friendships has grown over the years, following a ‘snowball effect’, which make life in this beautiful city particularly worth living in – a city without human contact is a rather sterile affair. And the idea that the people of Hamburg are closed-off and cold is a prejudice that may be widespread in the south of the country – but we can report the exact opposite.: friendly, open-minded and tolerant people who are simply lovely and who you wouldn’t want to miss. After 30 years of Hamburg experience, we are still Quiddjes, but you can only hear it in the slight nuances of our local dialect. 🙂