Photos & Stories

Where: Blankenese, a quarter in the Western part of Hamburg. On a path at the Elbe bank.
When: A nice sunday afternoon. In fact Easter sunday.
Who: Two women. Middle aged. Walking. They were in the middle of a chat, when I was passing by and I couldn’t help listening in to what they were saying right then…

– …well, this woman that I met at the parent-teacher conference.
– Yeah?
– Well, nothing special. She just came across to me like… just like a secretary at one of our golf clubs. Or something.
– And?
– Turns out she is a head physician at the hospital. I was kind of surprised, really.

… and so they continued chatting after I had passed by.

Blankenese: Average per-capita income is around €95,000 annually (more than three times German average)

(So, Blankenese is an immensely wealthy area in Hamburg. In fact one of the most wealthy areas in all of Germany. A reader of the German version of this piece asked me: How does a bloody golf club secretary look like? Well I have no idea. Never met one. But I do know that in poorer neighbourhoods of the same city the chatting ladies probably would have used say „a check-out girl at a food store“ as a social benchmark for first impressions.)

Hamburg, April 2015