This is one happening place. There is a great energy that flows through the people, the businesses, and the night life. Optimism abounds with a sense of purpose and the “desire to do” is impressive.

I haven’t seen Larry the cable guy walking around, but if he were here he’d say, “erhalten Sie sie getan.” And they do get-r-done.

I’ve got to get-r-done on this blog as it is tough to keep up. I’m behind on my updates because the schedule has just been awesome (and I can't say no).  I’m averaging about 3 – 4 hours of sleep per night. I’m loving it though as the people make it worth it. I just hope I don’t bonk as the trip winds on.

This post will be rather long, but I still have Lubeck and more from Hamburg coming. Anyway, here is a peak at some of the first two days in Hamburg.

Dinner with European Fellow Alumni

Our first night was spent at dinner with local European Marshall Alumni at Literaturhaus Café. I spent most of the time talking with Stephan Kraxner, who is a Christian Democrat (center right) and a member of the state parliament. We talked politics and there system is a bit different than ours. Here are some examples…

• When folks join a political party they pay monthly dues.
• The parties have regular meetings, newsletters do things like go on camping trips and have cookouts to keep folks engaged.
• There are no primary elections or party voting restrictions.
• Each party will field five candidates for every office and each person gets five votes that they can split among the candidates as they see fit. As you might imagine the ballot can get really confusing…

ZEIT Foundation

On Thursday morning we met with Dr. Markus Baumanns of the ZEIT Foundation Ebilin und Gerd Bucerius. The foundation was started by Gerd Bucerius, a very successful magazine publisher, and is the 7th largest foundation in Germany. They are doing some great things in education, fine arts, and financial markets.

The ZEIT Foundation also started Germany’s first private law school, which is fast becoming the model for higher education here. These folks are smart, determined and well organized. There is more info in the links section. I hope to connect Dr. Baumanns with my uncle Leary, who is the Dean at Elon University’s new law school.

NDR and ARD

NDR and ARD are both public television stations. NDR is a television station that is available in the northern regions of Germany and ARD is a nationwide. They are both run by the government and Thorsten Mann-Raudies is the Lieter Task Force DVB-T Deutschland.

We talked about television and media in Europe. Technically speaking, Europe uses a completely different system than we do, but viewing patterns seem to be rather similar and the average German watches approximately 3.75 hours per day. In case you are wondering…the average US citizen watches more…

Germany has an impressive plan for nationwide mobile television, but it will take many years to implement as governance for media is done at both the state/regional level as well as the federal level.

The batteries for my camera died…ugh…so I didn’t get any pictures at NDR. I snapped one with my cell phone, but when I tried to send it to my email account I got a “user banned” message, so something is up with multimedia messaging from the phone as I’ve been texting just fine. I haven’t had time to call Cingular about it yet.

Nocturnal Norms

We also studied the nocturnal social norms of Hamburg and through much in depth research found the city to be a blast! There are lots of great restaurants, clubs, music, dancing, and more… We started with a trip through the St. Pauli district (I know where that girl comes from now).

We walked, talked, drank friegel, people watched, played table football (foozball), and even went dancing. Like Amsterdam, Hamburg has a red light district, though it is much smaller and “protected”.   It was walled off so that folks can't stumble upon it by accident. 

The thing I found the most interesting is they just love music from the 80s. Every club played it, and everyone knew all the words to songs I hadn’t heard in years. It was kind of surreal, but very fun. 

All right, that is enough for now. I’ll try to catch up tomorrow. Thanks for hangin in Hamburg with me.