Two Engineers Take on Europe: Weißer Spargel in the Rain

Nuremberg is gray and rainy and I already miss our car as we trudge through the mist to get from the main train station to our hostel... luckily it's less than a ten minute walk. The main street outside the station is jammed with tram and car traffic, so pedestrian traffic is funneled underground through the subway station. We exit on the other side through a corridor where what looked like a group of junkies were hanging out waiting for a fix. We made a note not to return to this station at night... or ever.

We arrived at our hostel and put our bags in luggage storage, and after consulting the guide book, we decided to visit the Nazi Party Rally Grounds (Dokumentationzentrum). This location not only hosted the Nazi Rallies, but it made Nuremberg the face of the Nazi party by drawing in thousands of people from all over the country for parades, dance festivals and various displays of military power. The museum here, Fascination and Terror (Fazination und Gewalt), is located in the unfinished remains of what would have been Congress Hall. I highly recommend this museum - it's extremely informative and has a lot details that you won't learn about in school history books. It's about a 10-15 minute tram ride out of the city center and we thought it was well worth the trip.

Front of Fascination and Terror museum

From inside the center of Congress Hall

Congress hall from across the lake

These grounds were supposed carry extremely large scale venues where Hitler thought would host the every single olympic games following his win of WW2. That sounded absurd when I first read it, but maybe it's not such a bad idea now to have one location for the olympics... but that's a different story. The fantastically large Zeppelin Field is now used for music festivals like Rock in the Park which was happening June 3rd-5th (just missed it! so many good bands too... August Burns Red, We Came as Romans, Of Mice and Men... Red Hot Chili Peppers... VOLBEAT... okay I'm off track again). Anyway because of all the great bands in town, we couldn't see Zeppelin Field up close... and then due the cold rain, which was now coming down pretty hard, we decided not to complete our walk around the other side of the Congress Hall and down to the big parade strip and to the actual rally grounds. What's really just incredible is just the scale of this architecture. Much of it didn't get finished, but the museum showed detailed plans for what would have been a sports arena (for soccer/football and other sports) designed to hold 400,000 people... and that was just one arena in this vast complex. To help describe the sheer size of this entire area, this is what it looked like during a Nazi rally:

Once we returned the city, we went to Istanbul Restaurant for some tasty kebabs and hummus... the pitas at this place are to die for, and you get the cutest little glass of tea with every meal! Cash only though... that was embarrassing. We definitely meant to go to an ATM before getting food but we totally forgot and of course this place was cash only. Andy had to sit and sweat while I ran across the street in search of an ATM. Fortunately there was one close by!

Our post-meal tea!

We were able to check into our room soon after that and we proceeded to take a nap in the comfiest hostel bed (or maybe any bed) we've ever been in. The plan was to go to the German National Museum later because it just happened to be Wednesday and that museum is free on Wednesdays after 6! This was a good day for museums because this was another great experience! I'm sorry I didn't take any pictures of the square around it because it was really quite nice. It was also a nice change of pace to learn a bit about Germany history that didn't involve the Nazis. We left the museum around 9pm when it closed and went in search of some sort of night life... we found nothing except closed shops and a few rough looking characters walking around. Must have been the location... never stay in the museum/shopping district if you like nightlife. It wasn't the end of the world though, we just went back to the hostel and settled for a beer on the still-damp-from-all-the-rain terrace.

The next morning we slept in and enjoyed that room and our late check out. Once we were all packed up, we checked out, threw out luggage back in storage and headed out to start the day right with cupcakes and cappuccinos for breakfast at Fortezza espresso bar and into Hauptmarkt... this is where the biggest Christmas market in Germany is every year!

In the summer it's a giant produce market! For €3.50, we bought these giant falafel wraps packed with veggies and falafel fried to order. SO GOOD.

Frauen Kirche

Inside the church

The constant rain/mist is getting kind of annoying but we carried on to go up to see the Imperial Castle. I guess we decided we had seen enough castles in Rheinland because we climbed up to where the castle was but didn't want to pay the entrance fee to go inside. Near this area is an art bunker that they used to safeguard many of this city's famous art pieces during the war. We didn't get a chance to visit it but learning about it made me really appreciate all the ancient relics of German history that we saw the night before in the German National Museum, as well as inside the churches throughout the city. Without this art bunker, who knows what would have been lost. Nuremberg was also fortunate (if you could call it that) that it was bombed later in the war so people working to protect the art pieces knew what to expect after the northern cities had already been bombed....

Wandering around the Imperial Castle

View of St Lawrence Church from the top!

We had lunch at Bratwursthäusle where we had, believe it or not, our first bratwurst on this trip and our first weißer Spargel ever! (White asparagus!) After lunch we went for a last walk to kill some time... we had a 4:30 to Vienna... so we walked around the opera house near our hostel and noticed the DB museum... Deustche Bahn or the German Railway museum. Too bad Edwin wasn't with us... I bet they had a few high speed train connectors in there! With that, we bid Nürnberg and its lousy weather farewell as we headed off to the actual train station to make our final stop in Vienna.