Isemarkt

This guide to Hamburg's Isemarkt opens with a puzzle nobody can settle: ask how long the market is and you get three wildly different answers, despite it running every Tuesday and Friday since 1949. You'll hear why the number keeps slipping, starting with the fact that the market was never planned at all, but grew stall by stall beneath a railway viaduct built for the U-Bahn overhead, not for fish and tulips below. Walk the iron arches between Hoheluftbrücke and Eppendorfer Baum and listen for the trains still rumbling above the two hundred-plus stalls.