The Park and the Riot

I woke up early this day and decided to explore my part of town and it’s actually a really beautiful area of Hamburg.  There are many nice café’s, bars, and shops.  Around noon, I met Matt at the train station and we met up with another Miami Ad School student, Joe, and we all went to the giant park near my apartment.  It’s actually 150 hectares (or 375 acres for all you non-metric folks).  There was a giant planetarium, lake, a few theatres and about 2-3 beer gardens throughout the park.  It was really nice.  After the park, Joe, Matt, and I decided to go to Sternshanze or the “Shanze” for short which means the “blade” for a night out on the town.  It was actually our program director that recommended the place.

Part of the Park

As soon as we got off the train, we realized something was off.  The whole previous 2 days we hadn’t seen more than 5 “polizei” or police.  As we were leaving the station, we noticed there were cops everywhere around us.  After having a beer and some weird brat/curry/burrito thing I bought from a street vendor, we noticed there was a lot of commotion a couple blocks away.  Naturally we wanted to see what it was all about so we started walking into the crowd.  We soon noticed that about 40-50 police in full riot gear were shortly behind us.  Evidently this area of town is very alternative and full of punk rock kids.  They hate big business and even more, cops.  Recently a McDonalds as well as a few other big German businesses had moved into the area and were greeted with tons of vandalism from the punks.  Hamburg soon made the area a police state and the tension finally boiled over.

As we reached the excitement we realized something was on fire so we asked someone what was going on and evidently the rioters flipped a cop car (a BMW, of course) and lit it on fire.  Soon we started hearing what sounded like gun shots and a herd of people came running at us.  The gun shots were cops firing tear gas into the crowd.  Once we thought we were far enough away, I turned around and was hit with a little tear gas that was caught in the breeze.  Soon fire trucks showed up and were spraying everyone back with fire hoses.  The night continued with dozens of broken windows, 1 more flipped cop car, thousands of beer bottles pelted at police and fire trucks, and 67 people arrested.

After the riot was pretty much under control, we headed the “Reeperbahn” which is famously known as Hamburg’s red-light district.  We walked down the street checking out all the sex shops, strip clubs, and peep shows from the outside (Yes, the outside).  We were also stopped by at least 20 prostitutes, none of them pretty.  I finally got back to my flat around 4-5 in the morning.