Back to Nürnberg, Part Two

On March 15, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany3 Comments

After I was done at Doku-Zentrum, I took the tram back toward the Bahnhof, and from there I met Heather from “Heather Goes Deutsch” for lunch and some hang time. Heather lives in Nuremberg and teaches English there.

I’ve noticed a trend among other Americans that I’ve run into here. We tend to be in one of three categories: Technology workers, Teachers, and Students. (Although there are a huge amount of American troops here in Germany, I’m not counting the military folk because they’re not necessarily in Germany by choice, and many of them tend to have short term assignments here before getting deployed elsewhere.)

Ah, but I digress. I was talking about Nuremberg. Heather went to lunch. On the walk there, we saw some preaching Christians. They were much louder and more preachey than the Mormons from my previous visit.

Heather and I ate at Alex, which is a chain- I’ve eaten in the Regensburg location as well as the Nuremberg one. Alex feels a bit like TGI Fridays or Applebees back home. It overlooks a large courtyard which was filled with a green market at the time.

After lunch, it was time for a walk up a very steep hill to see the castle that I missed last time I was in town. It was tall and castley. Heather warned me about the hill, but it was much steeper to get all the way up than I expected. (The journey back down looked like it would have been a lot of fun on roller blades. Until you broke your neck, that is.)

Here is a rare photograph where I’m in front of the camera instead of behind it:

The castle ramparts were sufficiently high up that the view was pretty spectacular looking over the town. Here’s part of it:

After our controlled descent from the castle, we walked around the city a little bit more. While Regensburg has monuments to Kepler, Nuremberg has the Albrecht Dürer house. Dürer, as it turns out, spent quite a bit of time in Nuremberg, born there in the late 1400s and returning for parts of the 1500s. He was there in between stints in Italy and the Netherlands, and his famous painting of a hare has resulted in a lot of rabbits in stores and sculptures. For example, there’s this super creepy statue. I told Heather that it looks like Alice in Wonderland on peyote.

By this point in the afternoon, I was pretty much ready to hop a train back home, so we started to follow the city wall back toward the train station. Interesting fun fact: The wall around the city of Nuremberg is mostly stil intact You can walk along large sections of it and eventually you’ll wind up back at the train station.

On the walk back, I saw some nifty stuff that needed to be photographed. I’ll close out the post with these last three photographs-

1) Some nifty graffiti that translates to “Against sexism, against homophobia!” At some point I will take pictures of more graffiti around town in Regensburg. I’ve already got a nifty collection of pictures of the decals that people put on street signs and lamp posts- I find it fascinating.

2) A street musician playing an instrument that I can’t quite identify. It’s not quite a harp, but it’s similar. It also looks quite heavy.

3) Random Greenpeace protest. Apparently they’re against nuclear power. (And power is yet another topic on my future posts list.)

Back to Nürnberg, Part One

On March 12, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany2 Comments

This weekend, I found myself with a free Saturday- no plans. What I did have was a BahnCard, a nearby train station, and a surge of wanderlust. But where could I go that would be interesting, but wouldn’t involve a hotel or an overnight stay… well, I never did get to see all the touristy stuff in Nuremberg, so that seemed like a winner.

Administrative note #1: I referred to the city in the title of this post as Nürnberg, and in the paragraph above as Nuremberg. Both are correct- Nürnberg is the German word, and Nuremberg is the English spelling. (See also: Munich and München.)

Administrative note #2: I’m splitting this trip into two posts because I’ve got about twenty photographs and there’s a good and logical place to split them apart. Moving on!

Every trip to another place so far has started with the same thing: Trains! And while the view from the train last time I travelled was snow covered fields, this time around the green is starting to come back. The snow that was there melted off, and the plants are pretty happy about it.

The trip to Nuremberg on an ICE (Inter City Express) train is roughly an hour long; a very quick and comfortable ride. Once I got to the city, I followed the signs to the tram, which is basically a ground level train system. The streetcars in San Francisco are more or less the same thing.

Side note: The crutches the girl in this picture is using? They’re very common in Germany. Frankly, I think they’re much better than the sore-armpit crutches that are commonplace in the US when people sprain an ankle or what have you.

The #9 tram takes about ten minutes to get to the Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände, or the Doku-Zentrum for short. This is the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rallying Grounds. It’s a museum in the unfinished Congress Hall where many Nazi party rallies were held.

There is a tremendous amount of archival footage from the Nazi rallies, along with artifacts from that time. Although Nazi symbols and paraphernalia are illegal in Germany in the present day, that wasn’t always so. There’s an example of old army man toys- the same kind that children in the US play with all the time. The difference between little green US Army men and these is obvious and striking though:

It’s also interesting to see the commemorative things- this is the sort of products that the Franklin Mint sells today, except this was all Hitler all the time:

There were also newspapers on display from many nations during that time period. It was interesting for me to see the political cartoons of the time from the American newspaper.

There were a great many photographs and films of bombings, of allied troops reaching Nuremberg, and so forth. There was an entire section dedicated to the Nuremberg trials, and the original books, logs, and tapes of the Goering interviews are all on display here.

The exit path of the museum contains a section with chips that have the names of many concentration camp victims on them, along with the names of the camps. It’s designed to look like a train track that goes on and on- very striking.

All in all, this was a fascinating museum. Since my arrival, I’ve seen lots of news reports about Nazi activity- as I said previously, it’s illegal here now, but there are still pockets of Nazi activity in some of the cities. While I don’t think anything like the Holocaust could happen again, this was still a pretty sobering experience.

Luckily, the rest of the Nuremberg trip was all fun and games. And lots of walking. Lots and lots of walking. That will all be in the next post.

Two If By Train

On February 27, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe, Life In Germany9 Comments

I’ve always wanted to see Europe. Lots and lots of Europe. Up until I moved to Germany, however, I had never actually been to Europe. When I was given the chance to work in Germany for Mr. Company, one of the biggest draws was that I would be here for a long period of time- exploring Europe from Europe is a great deal simpler than trying to do it in a series of shorter trips from the US.

To add to my wonderment, Regensburg sits on a major rail line. The Regensburg Bahnhof is a five minute walk from my apartment. From there, I can be to Munich in just under 90 minutes. In five hours I can be to Vienna, Salzburg, or Prague. In less than seven hours, I can reach Berlin or Zurich. In eight hours, I can reach Amsterdam, Budapest, or Paris. If I have ten or twelve hours, I can reach Venice, Rome, or London. That’s just rail- if I take a 75 minute train to Munich, I can hop a flight to just about anywhere in no time at all.

I just got my BahnCard, too. The BahnCard system is a wonderful boost to someone like me. For a yearly fee up front, you get a percentage of all of your rail travel discounted within Germany. The BahnCard 25 is less than sixty Euros up front, and is 25% off your rail for that year. The BahnCard 50, which I purchased, is 240 Euros per year, but it provides a 50% discount. I’ve already made back 20% of the expense, and I just got the card last week. There’s also a BahnCard 100, which is an obscene amount of money up front, but BC100 holders do not pay anything additional for their German rail travel for that year. It’s the Black Card of the EuroRail system, literally- it’s actually a black card. Regular BahnCards arrive in a flat white envelope, but the BC100 arrives in a presentation box, pictured below. (And shamelessly stolen from http://blog.mahrko.de/.)

To add to the seven layer burrito of awesome that is the BahnCard, RailPlus is automatically granted on every BahnCard, which grants 25% off of ticket prices for another 24 countries. From here, I can start planning on little rail trip weekends whenever I feel like it.

I’m gonna go everywhere.

It’s a bad, bad day to be a necktie.

On February 16, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe, Life In Germany4 Comments

Just before the end of January, I was in the grocery store with a friend when we passed an aisle filled with costumes- the exact same sorts of costume gear that you would normally see in a Target or a Walgreens just before Halloween. Naturally, I asked what the deal was.

It turns out that there’s another holiday here that involves dressing up. It’s called Fasching, and it’s this month. Fasching is Carnival, a.k.a. the local version of Mardi Gras, and it happens roughly seven weeks before Easter. It spans several different days, with a variety of different events.

The Thursday before Ash Wednesday is known as “Weiberfastnacht”, or “Women’s carnival night”. On this day tradition dictates that women are allowed to cut off the tie of any man within reach. The women are also allowed to kiss any man they like, according to some versions of tradition. (Not one to waste an opportunity, I bought four cheap neckties. And some ChapStick.)

The following Monday is known as Rosenmontag (Rose Monday). On Rosenmontag there are various street processions involving lots of costumes and carnival floats. Faschingsdienstag (Carnival Tuesday) is the last day of Fasching and when most of the festivities happen. Faschingsdienstag is not an official public holiday in Bavaria, but it’s still celebrated.

The traditional food of Carnival season is Krapfen, or donuts. They’re available in every bakery, in all sorts of different flavors. I’ve heard of varieties containing sweets such as vanilla, marmelade, or chocolate.

According to legend, it used to be customary to choose a man to be the “sacred king” of the tribe for a year. The method of choosing the sacred king was the King’s Cake. A coin or bean would be placed in the cake before baking and whoever got the slice with the coin was the chosen one. Another version of the King’s Cake story says that it’s just a king for a day scenario. I haven’t found any reference works that I trust to be completely authoritative so far, but I’ve seen numerous references indicating that the King’s Cake idea has evolved into the donuts that we’re familiar with today.

My favorite part of this, so far,is the costumes though. So far today, I’ve only seen three people dressed in costume so far, and two of them worked in the bakery where I get my morning pretzel. I’ve also seen posters for Kinder-Fasching, which is basically for the kids. (Kinder = children.) I suspect I’ll see a bunch more costumes after work, but I expect to see more when I go out this evening for my usual bi-weekly Stammtisch. The word doesn’t translate easily to English, but a stammtisch is just a meeting group. This particular stammtisch is the Regensburg English Stammtisch, which is a group that meets every other Thursday to drink and chat in English. I try not to miss it because it’s a heap of fun.

Naturally, I’ll have another tie on for that part of my evening.

Down To Kempten

On February 4, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany4 Comments

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I took some time off work for my first solo overnight out-of-town journey by train since arriving in Germany.

It’s been pretty cold for the last few days, with the temperature staying well below freezing. This has the benefit of giving us more sunlight, though, so the train ride was populated by views like these- fields of snow, blue skies, and the occasional road or small town. I love the blue skies though-

Near the end of the trip, I was further south, near the Austrian border, and in the Alps- much more snow, more white, and more trees covered in white. At the start of the trip, however, there was a lot of green in the distance, as in this photo.

So much snow…

At the midway point, I had to change trains in the Munich Bahnhof, which is the central train station for the city. The Munich Bahnhof is, to date, the coolest thing I have seen in Germany. When I was walking between my trains, I saw all the trains lined up at their platforms and I couldn’t help but think that this place reminded me of spacedock from the Star Trek movies.

The stopover in Munich also gave me a chance to get a fresh butterbreze, or buttered pretzel. I am addicted to butterbreze- they’re my crack. One more train ride and I was in the little town of Kempten, down south. My purpose for the trip was a concert, but first I had to get to my hotel near the concert venue. Both locations were a little bit more than a kilometer away from the train station, so I went on foot. This allowed me the opportunity to laugh heartily at this store:

Apparently, the idea of “US Streetwear” here is synonymous with gangster rap- it was sneakers, sweats, giant hats, and gold bling. The entire store was unintentionally hilarious.

My hotel was roughly 150 or so meters from the concert venue, and both were across the street from a shopping mall- this gave me the opportunity to get some food before the show and to people-watch, which is always fun. The hotel, The Hotel Am Forum, is a nice place with a very friendly staff. When they saw me struggling with the German, they immediately switched to very good English. The rooms were clean and well maintained, and the hotel had a nifty floor structure- you go up a spiral staircase to get to your room:

But all of this is set-up for the reason I went to Kempten in the first place. I was there to attend a VNV Nation concert at The bigBOX Allgäu. I was originally not sure why they chose Kempten instead of, say, Munich for the show. However, the bigBOX turned out to be a pretty excellent concert venue. The bigBOX has an upstairs for super huge events, and a downstairs area for smaller shows like this one.

When I got to the bigBOX, a question I didn’t even know I had was answered right away- what do a few hundred concert-goers do with their coats during the show? In restaurants here, it’s not uncommon to have coat racks or hooks near your table for you to hang up your coat while you dine. In a place like the bigBox? There’s a garderobe (wardrobe) with an attendant- for one Euro, they will hold your coat and give you a numbered chit to retrieve it after the show. This is a brilliant and elegant solution- I had assumed I’d just have to hold onto my coat for the entire show, and I’m glad I was wrong.

I’ll conclude this post with three pictures from the show. VNV Nation puts on a great live show. They truly enjoy playing for their fans, and it shows. I’ve seen them about half a dozen times, but all the other shows were in Florida. This is more or less what they look like.