Today was my birthday and we decided to celebrate in Hamburg! We stayed here for 2 nights, during which time Alex spent lots of time with her German friend, Laura, who had made the trip up from Dusseldorf especially to see me (and perhaps Alex as well).

The hotel spoiled us with a birthday cake and although Lidia had booked the champagne package, after we enjoyed our bottle of champagne they accidentally delivered a second one. We told them about the mistake and they said "Don't worry about it" so we scored a free bottle of champers which we took with us to Berlin.

Lidia had also booked the executive lounge package so we spent a bit of time there as well.

Laura was lots of fun and we did the hop on, hop off bus with her and had dinner at the Hofbrauhaus.

We also visited my favourite place of the holiday: Miniature Wonderland! This place is so amazing. It is a gigantic warehouse in the funky waterfront warehouse district of Hamburg that is full of miniature versions of many major cities around the world.

They are setup with train sets everywhere, cars that drive themselves around the roads, complete with indicators and stop lights that come on when they approach a red light, and they even have an airport, where planes take off and land and taxi around the runways. The level of detail is simply gobsmacking. It must have taken hundreds of people years to put it together. I could have spent hours in there, but the girls got bored after a while. Even then they went to have a drink in the cafeteria while I continued to wander around.

Other than that, there isn't a huge array of things to do in Hamburg so we found ourselves mostly wandering around eating sausages.

We did catch half of the Euro 2016 game between Germany and Italy on a big screen in a packed square in Hamburg. That was a real experience in culture.