I "bought" a bike from the girl I sublet from (I gave her 100 euros, and she'll give it back when I give her the bike). It's an odd bike, an old-style 3-speed that no longer has two of them. It has a handbrake for the front wheel, and a pedal-brake for the back. I can hardly remember when I last rode a bike with a pedal-brake. I think I was 8... Meanwhile it's much heavier than my nice road bike, and much harder to start and stop. In fact, when I first got on it I had a hard time figuring out how to ride it! You'd have thought I'd have never done this before...
But eventually I got the hang of it (er, kind of...), especially after we lowered the seat, and soon we were tooling around Hamburg. Hamburg is an extremely bike-friendly city. Everyone rides. (And most people ride bikes like mine.) It's also mostly flat, so the riding is easy. Plus you are allowed to ride on the sidewalk. (Many sidewalks even have specially-marked sections for bikes.)
Hamburg also has a lot of water. It's on the Elbe river, which is wide enough to have a port, and it has a large lake with connected canals in the middle of the city. We rode our bikes to the north of the lake until we found a place to rent a canoe. Then for an hour we paddled across the lake and through the maze of canals. Some were quiet and still and serene, and others were like the autobahn for light watercraft as hundreds of other people took to the water on one of the last nice summer days for a long while.