The Race to Find ‘Die Tropengewachshaus’ | Neyah Johnson

My group inside of the Botanical Garden.

After finishing lunch, Mrs. Davis calls us over and tells us to get into groups with our roommates. All of the girls are in one room, and once she realizes that we obviously have the advantage she then tells us to get into one large circle, so that we can count off and form a new group. Along within myself there is Tommy, Lowell, Spencer, and Luke in my group. Mrs. Davis has a small stack of maps in her hand and she says “For this assignment, Myers and myself have circled some places on these maps that we’d like you all to go find and document them with pictures and videos”. The first thought that came to my mind was “IT’S A RACE!” Sadly, it wasn’t a race, but I still wanted to get the assignment done as quickly as possible. We were told that we would need to use public transport and possibly the help of a few locals to find our location. After a quick look at our map we saw that we needed to find the “Tropengewachshaus”. Although we did have an idea about the location we should be heading toward I wanted to be certain and since I was the only student in my group who spoke a decent amount of German, I went to ask some locals on the train. I asked a German couple which stop we should get off at and after they ensured us that we were on right path we all said “Dankeschön,” which translates to “Thank-you”.

Once we got off the train we walked a short distance to find a sign pointing us in the direction of our final destination. As we continued to walk, bikes and German locals quickly passed by us. All I could think in my head was how they probably assumed that all Americans walk slowly, and compared to the Germans most of us really do.

After a few minutes we finally arrived at the “Planten un Blumen”, which is a local park with a lot of flowers, a few restaurants, and some lakes. There was an ‘X’ on our map with the word “Tropengewachshaus” so we tried to locate this specific spot in the park. We walked around the park trying to make connections to what we saw on the map to what was in front of our eyes and the ‘X’ and the spot in the park did not match up. “What if they just marked a spot on the map” I said to my group. Everyone laughed at first, but then we realized that may truly be the case. I spoke with two women who I thought were locals, but they ended up being Dänisch tourists. This worked in our favor because they had a map that had the “Tropengewachshaus” marked in a completely different spot. After talking to one more local German woman we were headed in the right direction.

A short walk brought us to the “Tropengewachshaus”, which translates to Botanical Garden. We went inside and the flowers that we found were amazing. Plants and flowers from several environments, including the desert and the rainforest, where all found in the building. The different environments where all in separate rooms, so as we walked through the different rooms the temperature changes were obvious. I went from sweating in one room to freezing in the next, so it was safe to assume that I would be sick by the time we finally exited. After taking pictures of some of the plants and flowers in a few of the rooms, we couldn’t take the heat anymore and we decided that we had documented enough and decided to head back to hostel. On the walk back we talked about our journey and the confusion with the ‘X’ compared to the actual location of the Botanical Garden. I think that we all enjoyed the experience and for me it was definitely one of the most memorable moments of Hamburg thus far.