For Visitors of the 29. Chaos Communication Congress

at Congress Centrum Hamburg (CCH)  Dec. 27th – 30th 2012

Eigentlich sollte das hier nur ein Blog-Kommentar zu den Möglichkeiten der Freizeitgestaltung für Besucher des Kongresses in Hamburg werden. Jetzt, wo ich mir soviel Arbeit gemacht habe, stell ich’s auch hier rein.

Just FYI, things that Google Maps (or OSM) don’t say about the location: If you are at the at 29C3 and for some reason you’ve had enough of IT (Internet Things), then you have several options for almost every kind of taste:

***If you feel like more intellectual stuff, different kinds of food and mybe books printed on paper, you can go north where you will find the main campus of the university of hamburg.
***If you feel like post-christmas shopping in a standardized shopping street, you can go south to Mönkebergstraße and -once there- have a peek at the nice town hall. Not so much the bombing in the war but much more the city developement plan of the last decades did not leave much of the old town, but here and there, you will find some nice remains.
***If you feel like having a walk in the park, this is actually the easiest thing to do, since the CCH is located in the middle of the horticultural jewel of Hamburg: „Planten und Blomen“ (granted, winter is not time #1 to visit, but there is also a tropical green house).
***If you miss Berlin too much, the Schanzenviertel west of the CCH might be a place to go. Pubs, coffee shops, a good variety of things to eat and a squat cultural center might give you what you crave for, even though it’s smaller and it’s simply not Berlin.
***If you go east you will find the lake Alster in the middle of town. Since sailing season will be over by then, you can walk around it. Walking ON it is not recommended, even when its frozen. (Maybe climate change will play for us once – and you can bring you ice skates? not sure, even though it was possible this year in February)
***In case you like drinking a lot of alcohol (and only then, otherwise its not bearable) you can go to the legendary Reeperbahn* in St. Pauli quater. Uncounted pubs, clubs, discos, strip clubs, whorehouses, thousands of drunken tourists, bachelor partys, people from the suburbs flipping out… as mentioned before: you better be well drunk to go there. But then it might be fun.

In the end, the location of the CCH is pretty much right in the middle of  the most interesting quaters of  Hamburg, with a very good connection of public transport.

*Für die Berliner: in Hamburg heisst nur ein Kiez „Kiez“, und das ist die Gegend um die Reeperbahn