Hamburg, the city of Harbor.

   It was a week long academic trip to the city of Hamburg 'the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg' or 'Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg.' It aimed to kick off a newly designed project by a sociologist staff at the University of Hamburg. It captures a contemporary issue, the transnational change in the Palestinian family that resides in three separated community the West Bank, the Palestinian minority within the occupied 1948 borders, and in Germany.

Hamburg caught my attention much in July last year when headlined the international media outlets when thousands of protesters went onto the streets across the city during the ceremony of G8 summit that was held there. The main reason behind the riots is protesting against president Trump's global policies and the summit that embraced these policies.

At the arrival, the city speaks itself with her various manifestations; streets, gardens, and the distinguished architecture is as usual insinuates a long history of civilizational building that seems to have passed through different phases to end up as such. This architecture reminds me of many things portray Europe, it's not only the field of interests that have highlighted Europe on certain occasions when I learned about the history, but also, I used to watch cartoons during childhood designed by cartoon makers who objectified the historical European landscape on their long episodes. For instance, The Three Musketeers (الفرسان الثلاثة)  by Alexandre Duma. These episodes left an image that Europe is a place should be explored one day. 

The city is harmonized with diverse cultures, there are multi-ethnic backgrounds coexist together in serenity. I couldn't touch upon any fissures among these diverse groups or had ever heard that Hamburg has attested ethnocentrism in its negative way, which led to vindictive reactions. 

To the contrary, the city of Harbour, per se, or as I could name it showed a role model of diversity. It's the way of life that I, all the time, call on all peoples to slip into in all walks of life. How wonderful this paradigm is! How wonderful to wake up every morning and see colourful landscape around and integrate into multiculturalism!

In Hamburg, it's inevitable to collide with individualism that means a lot to people there. I felt that those people would have said to me, had I asked why this individualism, "it's our absolute free choice to do whatever in this life as long as it doesn't violate the law or encroach on others' rights."

As we arrived the city, the Palestinian group through Jordan, the first day spent on touring around.  In the next days, we discussed the next steps to be carried out to get our long academic project done. How are we gong to carry it out by organizing interviews. There was a session captured our reflections on the interviews we had conducted experimentally just to get ourselves familiar with the atmosphere. What we did outside the workshops can be unforgettable, we enjoyed the amazement of the city, it's a cosmopolitan city reflects all colors of life in terms of the availability it provides its multiethnic citizens with, it's possible to pass by a convenience store or restaurants owned by Chinese, Italians, Latinos, Asians, Russians, Africans, Arabs, so on and so forth.

Therefore, in Hamburg you could indulge yourself with almost all tastes of life to the degree that you feel there is nothing missing in terms of food, outfits, and many other affinities.

The Elbe River gives the city another charming scene, we enjoyed a tour on the boat there, and we could see how it divides the city up into several areas from the north making wide fissures flooded by water. This constitutes as a water passageway to ships and to the international commercial shipping movement. Indeed, it constitutes an exist opens up more diversity to the city through touristic and industrial activities. From this point Hamburg can be names the city of Harbor.

 

The city is embellished by historical sites, like ancient buildings, churches have a lion share in these buildings. Also, there many pieces of arts are erected in different public places, these pieces are randomly shaped reflect meaningful messages that artists try to get across to the audience or their fans in particular. This kind of art in the street isn't only existent in Hamburg, but also, it's a common art existent across Germany. It amazes to stop by and start pondering what's the meaning behind such art, which is unfamiliar to us in the Middle East!

 

Although the hardship of fasting Ramadan there, I didn't spare time without taking advantage of to explore the city in all walks of life to relieve myself as much as possible. I did a small funny adventure just to add it in our commemoration with my colleague, we went out the classroom to roam the campus as we didn't join the lunch due to our fasting, we suddenly passed by a huge tree has much yellow fruit that didn't figure out what sort of fruit it is at the first glance. We approached to explore, it's like clusters of fruit shining under the sunrise, it attracted us to check it out, it was a cherry tree. I told my colleague, "let's pick up some, but let's take the permission."