I'm going to Hamburg in June for work. Don't know of I'll have time to do much but I haven't been to Germany since I was 12 and am not a seasoned international traveller. The only thing I know of Hamburg is that The Beatles spent a lot of time there when they first got started. I don't even know if they have a bundesliga club.

Any suggestions on sporting events or anything else to do?

My relatives live in southern Germany, in Ravensburg. How long would it take to get a train from there to Hamburg if I flew in a few days early to Munich and saw them before going to the meeting? Is it expensive?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger_SV

They have the unique distinction of having never been relegated from the top flight and are the only Bundesliga team to have never been relegated since the inception of the Bundesliga in the 1960s. Ruud van Nistelrooy plays there now, and it was Benny Feilhaber's first club, but he hardly ever played for them.

The only clubs that ever seem to get on FSC are Eintracht and Frankfurt.

I just realized the cup will be going on then. For some reason I thought it was later, like in July. So I guess I'll need suggestions on where to watch matches and where to buy Germany tat.

Ravensbrück is a fair distance from Hamburg. My guess, about 900km. The overnight train would get you from Munich to Hamburg by mid-morning. Don't know how much flights come to (actually, I must start doing some research on that myself).

Hamburg is very nice, but if you have a spare day, you should take a train to Lübeck, 65km away. It has the best preserved old city; real medieval stuff. The city was fortunate to be the first to get bombed, before Bomber Harris got really good at it. He still did serious damage, but Lübeck didn't get flattened, like most German cities. After that, the head of the Red Cross, a Lübeck fan, declared the city a place of safety for refugees, so it couldn't be bombed anymore.

And in Hamburg, you'll want to do an OTFathon with treibeis. He might take you to see FC St Pauli, the better footballing alternative than HSV.

Ravensbrück is a fair distance from Hamburg

I made that self-same slip of the tongue once. Fortunately, I didn't follow it up with stuff like "How can people live there of their own free will?"

real medieval stuff.

The same could be said of the people who follow the football team there.

G-Man's right, of course. Lübeck is very nice to look at.

He might take you to see FC St Pauli, the better footballing alternative than HSV.

G-Man's also right about the better footballing alternative. However, if you're coming in June, the season will already have finished. And even if it hadn't, the chances of getting tickets for a St Pauli game this season are slimmer than usual; they've knocked down the main stand, which has reduced the maximum capacity.

If you don't fancy not going to football games and eschewing Hamburg in favour of a medieval hamlet 60 kilometres up the road, then you still shouldn't have any shortage of things to do. There's St Pauli, of course, the red-light district. Or the Schanzenviertel, where all the media tarts hang around and mumble at each other in age-inappropriate language. You can take a boat round the harbour and/or the Alster lake-cum-river and/or up or down the Elb. There are lots of museums and galleries, too (so I've been told; I've only been here 20 years). And that's just the 'mainstream' stuff.

Reed if you go on the bahn.de website they you can work out how much it will cost - if you book in advance for a particular train it will cost 29 euros for your trip from Ravensburg to Hamburg. Or as an American you can get a rail pass giving you unlimited rail travel in germany for a few days. Very good value and a great way to see the country. The train journey up the Rhine is spectacular. And the rail pass lets you go on a Rhine boat too.

As for Hamburg the Alster is incredible thing in the middle of a city.The port is impressive and when i was there- a while ago - the City was an interesting place to hang out in and look around.

I really must get up to Hamburg and Lubeck again soon. Not least to see my favorite lower-league outfit, FC Altona 11 Alster.

Alternatively, Army Group Slovenia are planning a base camp at the Munich Hofbrauhaus in September, before crossing the Alps to Ljubljana by train.

When in Lubeck with a sweet tooth, check out Niederegger's for the finest marzipan anywhere.

I did that journey in the Summer, Duncan. A beautiful journey. Watch out for being thrown off the trains somewhere in Haiderland by the newly privatised Austrian Railways because of unannounced track repairs.

Ljubljana was great though. Could do better than the Hofbrauhaus I reckon...

Not least to see my favorite lower-league outfit, FC Altona 11 Alster

I remember your mentioning a team with this name, or something very similar, once before. Do they actually exist? Or is it a running gag that I'm too dim to pick up on?

Nefertiti2 wrote:
I did that journey in the Summer, Duncan. A beautiful journey. Watch out for being thrown off the trains somewhere in Haiderland by the newly privatised Austrian Railways because of unannounced track repairs

Yes, that section of the line was closed in October 2008 last time we were there. The week before Haider died, coincidentally.

Ljubljana was great though. Could do better than the Hofbrauhaus I reckon...

I'll mention it to the others, ta.

Treibeis wrote:
I remember your mentioning a team with this name, or something very similar, once before. Do they actually exist? Or is it a running gag that I'm too dim to pick up on?

A gag alas. Think "sitting on our arse in Belfast, the Pound's gone that's a pity"...

PS we play Germany in an U-21 on the Thursday evening. Hopefully in Bavaria?

Ravensburg, not Ravensbrueck. I don't know where the latter is.

I won't be there during the season, but I discovered that the European baseball cup (the club championship) is happening right before the meeting in Solingen. That would be interesting, but it's not close.

What sports do people on the continent follow in summer? It seems a bit thin.

I'd definitely be up for an OTFthon.

I'm also going to be coming to Sweden for work in the end of August. So I'll be asking for help on that then. I'm hoping I can go to the football then.

Ravensburg is still essentially an overnight trip, with changes. You are essentially traversing the entire country from north to south.

Formula One is probably the most popular "summer" sport in Germany in terms of television viewing.

If you have any interest in model trains, there is a completely insane one in Hamburg.

It's a great city, you will like it.

I'd love to take my niece and nephew to something like that. Sadly, they're not coming on this trip.

Ravensburg, not Ravensbrueck. I don't know where the latter is.

Ravensbrück is a village in north-east Germany that few people would have heard of if this place hadn't existed.

Reed, I hope you're not coming to Hamburg on 25th-27th June. That's the weekend of the "Harley Days". The city'll be overrun with thousands of people from all over the country riding their Harley-Davidsons round town and pretending that they're Hell's Angels when, in fact, they're Buxtehude's tax inspectors.

This may sound like fun, and I'm sure it is fun for the people who do it, but it's a pain in the arse for the rest of us. You wouldn't believe how strenuous sneering, moaning and making snide remarks for 72 hours on the trot can actually be.

The conference is June 21-23 at the Congress Center Hamburg Am Dammtor / Marseiller Straße.

I've been there twice and, perhaps tellingly, can hardly remember anything about it. A few pretty buildings, but essentially a bit of a boring town.

(I mean, unless you're into the whole tacky Reeperbahn stag night scenario, but Reed doesn't strike me as that kind of guy.)

Reed, you can walk from the hotel to the Alster harbor, from which a number of interesting boat rides are available.

A number of those go to the warehouse district (Speicherstadt) which is interesting in its own right, with a number of worthwhile museums. HSV and St. Pauli also have their own museums and tours (HSV's being much bigger, though St. Pauli is celebrating their centenary and therefore doing more than usual). Unfortunately, you will be too late to catch a Hamburg Freezers hockey game.

I've been there twice and, perhaps tellingly, can hardly remember anything about it. A few pretty buildings, but essentially a bit of a boring town.
(I mean, unless you're into the whole tacky Reeperbahn stag night scenario, but Reed doesn't strike me as that kind of guy.)

My knee-jerk reaction to this was "Boring? It can't be boring. I can't have spent half my life in a boring city." But I've never viewed Hamburg from the perspective of a long-weekender. Maybe, if you do indeed take the Reeperbahn and the rest of St Pauli out of the equation, there isn't that much to fill three days with that you couldn't get elsewhere.

I hold Munich in similar low regard - pretty uneventful, unless you like spending your time eating plates of farmyard and drinking beer out of over-sized glasses. I'm sure Herr Pepys of this parish would put me right on that but, like me in Hamburg, he's probably spent too much time there to remember what it was like to be a tourist.

Oh, and apart from the churches and the City Hall, the buildings in central Hamburg aren't particularly pretty, either. A lot of the good ones that survived the war are now getting a pretty savage kicking from the local government's urban-planning department.