We want to get from Berlin to Copenhagen in one day, but to do that would mean either leaving before 7am or getting there late in the evening. We have to change trains in Hamburg, a place where we plan on making a “whistle stop” anyway.

We left Berlin late Thursday morning in order to reach Hamburg before the afternoon rush hour. After spending a night there, we’ll catch a morning train for Copenhagen.

Even though we’re on a “non-smoking” car, this is one of the most hellish train rides we’ve ever taken. Our seats are in the end of the car closest to the smoking car, and only a single sliding door separates us from the toxic cloud on the other side. Every time someone passes through that door, cigarette smoke comes billowing into the “non-smoking” car.

Getting off the train in Hamburg felt like coming up from under water.

Hamburg Hauptbahnhof (main station) is not a pleasant place at 3 in the afternoon. It suffers from the same commercialization and lack of navigational aids that we’d found in Berlin, but this station is much more crowded and hysterical. It seems as if tens of thousands of people are there at any given time. We’ve never been in a station that’s this crazy.

Across from the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, this magnificent theatre is another specimen of beautiful buildings polluted by advertising banners.

It took a while to find the tourist information office, which was hard to see in the forest of big and bright banners for junk food stands. The TI did their job: We asked for a low-priced room close to the bahnhof, and we were sent to one a block away for 100 deutchmarks (less than $50).

A few minutes later we checked in, relieved ourselves of our rucksacks and set out for our main destination in Hamburg: the Kaiser Keller.

Kaiser Keller is a club on a strip called the Reeperbahn. In the early 60’s the Beatles played there almost nightly. Long before most people had ever heard of the Beatles they were the opening act for some other guy who’s been long forgotten.

Our map is adequate to show us how to get there on the S-bahn, but many factors conspired to keep this from being a pleasant trip. It didn’t help that we’re already in extremely foul moods from having spent over three hours in a cloud of tobacco smoke. And it’s rush hour.

In Berlin, ticket machines were on the main platform. On Hamburg’s main platform, we were sent back upstairs to find a ticket machine.

Then we lost about twenty minutes getting on the wrong train for a few stops, getting another train back, and waiting for the right train.

We plan to take pictures at the Reeperbahn, so we’re racing against the setting sun.

It turns out the Reeperbahn is a very sleazy neighborhood, filled with assorted strip clubs mixed in with an occasional disco or live music venue. At Kaiser Keller we saw a small display behind a window acknowledging that location’s significance in music history.

We walked about the neighborhood near our hotel looking for dinner. We found a health food store and asked the owner where we could eat without breathing smoke. He had to think hard before sending us to a place best described as a trendy cafe.

The cafe was in part of the ground floor of a larger building, and the smoke-free seating was out in the poorly-heated lobby. We ate a fairly decent meal with our coats on while a young couple groped each other very publicly on the other side of the window. No one bothered to tell them to “get a room.”