And so Hamburg, bigger than all but Berlin, remains a bit of a mystery, poised to become a thrilling discovery.
Since its March introduction, Aveder Outfit has quickly become a thrilling repository of bold and natty black styles.
Which brings us to the principal transformation at the club: this season Monaco have become a thrilling attacking team.
Meanwhile, I'd wasted decades replaying the experience in my head, like a movie whose ending I kept hoping would become a thrilling, Spielberg-ian spectacular but instead would forever be an M. Night Shyamalan-esque letdown.
They told us all about coal and steam and how the different levers worked, so it became a thrill to step up on the footplate.
It is not enough simply to beat those around them; what matters is raising the bar so high that turning up to train with each other on a Monday morning becomes a thrill.
With Ms. Mearns, its tremendous "Hungarian" variation, led by the piano, becomes a thrilling conflict.
"La Mer" becomes a thrilling, even frightening experience, but the Ravel "Bolero" brings the perfection of "German engineering" past the point of good taste: it sounds like the background music to the occupation of Paris.
And when Parrado and two others set off on a trek over the mountain with a quilt made of plane insulation, rugby boots on their feet and human flesh in their packs, the grim-to-grimmer tale becomes a thrilling mountaineering story.
As Adrian Chen wrote in June, Gawker was a great place to become a journalist — a thrilling, taxing editorial boot camp, where, with few constraints on your control and little institutional regard for approval, you were left with only your instincts to hone and test and trust.
