More Hamburg; Lübeck

The Handelskai region of Hamburg is another of those districts whose totem bird is the crane. The City clearly decided that it had slightly too many steamship docks and slightly too few expensive riverside apartments for contemporary economic conditions, and is acting to rectify this with up to sixteen cranes at a time. It also has a decent Museum of Seafaring, rather bigger and better than the similar one on the docks in Liverpool. And I saw a sailing ship (the Sea Cloud II) leave harbour, accompanied by the municipal mooring tug Mooring Tug II.

Dinner at a Persian restaurant called Teheran; pubs are not the first association I have with Teheran, so I assumed anywhere with so unprepossessing a name survived on its food. Fantastic buttery chicken and lamb kebabs. Then met up in Altona with a couple of people I'd met in the conference in Vienna last month - they have solved the crystal they've been stuck on for two years, thanks to chemistry rather than any particular contribution from the workshop, so we happily drank wine together.

I've just reached Copenhagen after spending the day in Lübeck. Hansestädter are almost too easily photogenic on clear days: blue sky, red brick, green copper roofs, water. Lübeck has particularly good spires, and a Great Gate the right side of which is leaning into the swamp in which it was built and containing a nicely Hanseatical exhibition (apparently Boston in Lincolnshire is England's main Hansestadt, where in the 1200s we swapped wool for salt cod).

I do not recommend anyone to drink bubble-tea in Germany until it's caught on a bit more. Eew, raw tapioca.

Well, that's another holiday destination ruled out

OK, it looks as if Russia is trying to do to Georgia in re South Ossetia what NATO did to Serbia in re Kosovo; I'm a little surprised I haven't heard Russian politicians making the comparison explicit. Except that Kosovo did not seek immediate merger with Albania, whilst I suspect the resolution of the current mess may well have South Ossetia become part of Russia de jure rather than the current de-facto status.

Time to import more wine, maybe. My sympathies are generally with Georgia, small democracies starting off with quite a lot of points in their favour against Russia, except for the major detail that, as far as I can see, Georgia started this debacle. They can't have expected the Russians to behave other than they have, so what did they expect to achieve?

Has Lebanon been war-free for long enough to contemplate a visit? My plans for Easter 2009 are still unformed.