Fleamarkets

Hamburg's great for a flohmarkt and every Saturday there's a big, busy one in Feldstrasse. Jenny and I went there today, and it's the first time I've seen English people in any numbers here. They seemed to be everywhere talking on mobiles and holding plastic bags.

Amongst the usual market tat there were some interesting things - a few bits of Whitefriars but nothing which blew my skirt up. And whilst most stalls were anything and everything, there were a few that specialised. One seemed to have a job lot of surgical instruments of every conceivable type (including a whole range of speculums which must have made every adult woman shudder when they passed), and then I came across this:

A whole stall devoted to old lab equipment? Stills, retorts, test tubes, bunsens. It's all there. Anyway, we didn't want any pyrex beakers or benzine droppers, so we headed out and passed the entrance to the DOM, which is right next to this edifice, called the Hochbunker.
That name is a masterstroke of understatement. It is HUGE. A government bunker from the last war, it's been reinvented as a gig venue and music school. When I asked Kai, our SM, why it hadn't been dismantled after the war, he said, in his typical dead-pan way, "Well, it was designed to be totally bomb-proof. That made it a bit difficult to demolish".

Good point.