Glutenfrei, Vego Hamburger?

A couple of weeks ago, Vicky and I went to Hamburg for a long weekend. It was a lot of fun. Hamburg is, after all, a party city. Check it out.

Obvs, we went to the Reeperbahn. You know all about that, I'm sure. A nod's a good as a wink to a blind bat, eh?

ominous clouds in the background, too

Hamburg is so sexually-charged that the handwash cream in our hotel room's bathroom was called "Tricky Ricky".

Tricky Ricky Handwaschcreme

And the tissue box cover's called "Hanky Panky".

ille Hanky Panky

No surprises, of course, that we went to the Reeperabahn to visit Beatlesplatz and the Beatlemania museum, near where they used to play. It was pretty fun and funny and I learned a lot. Did you know that John has often demented?

Sgt Pepper's: fully explained

I also had a very nice beer on the pavement with a meal called "Pinkus Special". I bought it for the name but would buy it again for the taste.

Pinkus Special

Pinkus logo

I even had a beer at 9am on Sunday at the Fischmarkt. Everybody else was doing it -- especially the overweight grannies dancing to "The Oldies", a brilliant almost-bilingual coverband -- and I just wanted to fit in.

Right at this point, I'm pretty sure that The Oldies were fantastically botching CCR

However, despite Hamburg's great party reputation, I am glad that we chose to live in Berlin. Don't get me wrong, Hamburg was great, but it's hard adjusting to a new way of live. Did you know that in Hamburg, you are not permitted to drink on the trains? I was truly baffled.

Fun police.

Fuck knows how I'll cope back in Perth where you can't hardly drink anywhere without the right permit and even then you have to be at least 3 metres away from a pregnant lady or something.

It's also really hard to get vegetarian and gluten free meals anywhere in Hamburg -- much moreso than in Berlin. We were there for 4 days. We had sushi for 3 meals. And even that was a bit of a spectacle. On our first attempt, after ordering our own selection of vegetarian delights, the waitress gave us twice as much as we ordered: one plate with our selection and one with what we assumed were "we're feeling generous and like you English types" complementary surprises.

After a while the waitress came back, said something hurried, and removed the platter, not yet finished, of our ordered sushi. After about two minutes, she brought it back and took away the other platter. After another couple of minutes, she brought back a different platter, obviously picked-at, with different sushi to our first bonus. We didn't eat any of that one and found different places for the following days. Sushi was our safest bet a lot of the time.

We ate no hamburgers. 

However, it was not a total loss. A colleague of Vicky's recommended the patisserie Herr Max as a fantastic cake shop. When we went to check it out, Vicky was lucky enough to snare the last slice of a glutenfrei carrot cake.

And they wrap it so delightfully.

Death Carrot - best bit.

Vicky liked the cake so much that we went back the next day, early, to dine in and have some more.

world's greatest gluten free cake?

We went back the day after that, too.

So, if you are vegetarian and gluten free in Hamburg, you might struggle a bit to find food other that sushi to eat. However, you'll have access to an amazing cake.

Is that worth not being able to drink on the trains, though?