Hamburg, 25.05.2025: Eurasian Blackbirds and Grand Sud Merlot

Georg Kolbe, Große Kriechende, Hamburg Stadtpark

We were so worn out from the long travel and the fuss and botheration with the flight that we slept till 10:45 A.M. After a bit of breakfast in W. and K.’s kitchen, the four of us waited for his sister H., who had been invited for the midday meal. 

We last saw H. twenty-five years ago when we spent Christmas and New Year’s with W. and K. in the year the millennium changed from 1999 to 2000. W. and K. have visited us three times since then, but we hadn’t been back to Hamburg after 2000, until we returned on this trip. 

H. is much as I had remembered her from previously, though coping, as we ourselves are, with aging. She appears to have diminished in size, and has had some serious health issues the nature of which isn’t entirely clear to me.

She’s a vivacious small blue-eyed blonde woman who chatters incessantly: sad chattering, since she’s alone and will freely tell you that she feels lonely and often depressed. She identifies as an Anglophile and studied English and American literature in university. Like W. and K., she speaks English very well — in H.’s case, with an English accent. 

I enjoyed talking to her — listening to her talk, that is — but after we’d eaten the meal K. had prepared (with W.’s assistance) of a mixed salad and a dish that seemed vaguely southeast Asian, W. tired of the conversation, excused himself, and took a long nap. K. told us when we and she were chatting, the three of us, that this is his normal behavior when H. visits, and that means she gets stuck listening and listening to H. hold forth.

The dish K. cooked: she learned the recipe from C., whose son C. we’ll visit tomorrow in Berlin (I’m writing on the 26th). It’s chicken cut into pieces and cooked with onions, then cooked in a sauce of coconut milk, mashed bananas, and pineapple pieces, with quite a bit of curry paste added. It’s served with chutney. I think it’s indefinably southeast Asian without being a bona fide dish of any southeast Asian cuisine. 

H. arrived just after 2 P.M. and stayed until about 6 P.M., at which time W. and K. suggested we eat a bit of Abendbrot and then walk to the Stadtpark, which is nearby, on the border of Winterhude and Ohlsdorf. If we had ever been to the Stadtpark before we walked through it last evening, I couldn’t remember. 

Rhododendron, Hamburg Stadtpark

The park’s very Hamburg, quiet, green, lots of birds singing loudly as evening began falling. I asked W. if he knew the name of one we could hear singing with particular vivacity. He thought it was a blackbird. I turned on the Merlin bird app from Cornell University’s ornithology lab, and, sure enough, the app identified the bird as a Eurasian blackbird.

Planetarium, Hamburg Stadtpark

I took some nice photos of the park, and they’ll speak for it, what we saw of it. Then back to the apartment and to bed. 

With our several evening meals of bread and butter, cold cuts, cheese, gherkins, and strawberries, W. has opened both white and red wines from the region of his and K.’s cottage in the south of France, the Languedoc-Roussillon region, where we’ll drive next week. I’m not sure of the name of the white. The red is Grand Sud merlot; I just had a small glass of it. Both are very good.