Hamburg
I owe this entry about my home city Hamburg to my blog... I love this picture which shows the Alster, the large city lake. If you look to the opposite direction you will see the river Elbe where the Hamburg port is located. It is the second largest port in Europe behind Rotterdam in the Netherlands and ranking amongst the top 10 container ports worldwide (2005: No.8). Cargo turnover increased by nearly 50% from 2000 to 2005! It takes ships 6 hours to get down the Elbe westwards to the North Sea (110 km or 68 miles). 80 km or 50 miles North East of Hamburg is the Baltic sea. So to some extent Hamburg is located in between two seas.
It is a vibrant, very open and international city. With 1.7 mio inhabitants (more than 4 mio in the metropolitan area) it is the second largest city in Germany after Berlin and Germany's leading international trading place. There are only a few cities in the world in which you find more consulates than in Hamburg where you have nearly 100 of them. Some major Japanese companies chose to establish their European logistic centers here like Panasonic, Olympus and Sharp. With 360 companies from Greater China the Chinese represent the biggest business community.
But Hamburg is also a major IT centre in Germany. From AOL and Adobe, via the content management software expert CoreMedia and Gentleware known for software modelling tools like Poseidon for UML to Google who just announced that in Google World Hamburg will be the first city to be viewed in real 3D, many top IT companies are located here. And... as readers of this blog know, Sun Microsystem's StarOffice/OpenOffice Team.
Around 20000 students in sciences and engineering graduate each year from several universities, a university research institute for computer science, the Hamburg Business Development Cooperation and the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce fuel the development of the IT sector.
The other side of the city which makes it a really nice place to live is the varied cultural life ranging for example from several musicals like Lion King, Dirty Dancing and others to it's night life in the former seaman's amusement neighbourhood “St. Pauli” with the world renown “Reeperbahn” also referred to as the “Kiez” (party and redlight district is probably the closest translation) which nowadays by the way also offers pretty much of a cultural variety. In simple words: just a great, nice city to visit, to live in or just to party in!
Posted at
11:33PM Mar 04, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Personal |
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Comments[2]
Posted by melanie gao on March 05, 2007 at 01:48 AM CET #
Posted by jproske on March 05, 2007 at 09:57 PM CET #