Monday, 2019 September 30

It was really windy overnight (I later learned that it was worse farther north, and there was actually significant damage from the winds in other parts of Germany). This led to a lot of banging of windows and other objects before the hotel staff got everything buttoned down.

I woke up about 0015 and couldn't get back to sleep with the noise. Krista woke up too, so we just laid there for a while. Once things had quieted down we both got back to sleep.

We met Dad for breakfast. He was moving very slow today - his knee was sore, and he thought the bed was hurting his back. He eventually got everything stretched out and warmed up, but it was clearly going to be a light day for him.

Today I remembered to go to the omelet station first, so I got some eggs (yesterday I didn't want to dirty two plates and I missed the station initially). Mostly I loaded up on the Nuremberg sausages, which continued to be absolutely delicious. They had a white sausage as well, but I didn't think it had much flavor.

We headed back to our rooms for a while, then met in the lobby at about 1000. We walked across the street to the tram station and bought tickets for the #8 tram. This was very easy - the ticket machines supported multiple languages and were easy to use.

The tram ride itself was uneventful. It was only about 15 minutes to the "doku-zentrum" station, the end of the line. We got off here and crossed the street to the Documentation Center. We had to climb some stairs to get into the museum, but Dad was moving a lot better by now and made it with no issues.

He wasn't interested in seeing the museum itself. Luckily it had a nice lobby with a cafe, so we left him there. Krista and I bought tickets (which included English-language audio guides), and headed in.

The museum documented the rise (and eventual fall) of the nazi party. For me this was almost entirely a review - I've been reading a lot of books set in the 20s, 30s, and 40s in Germany, plus I'm a bit of a history nerd when it comes to WW2. I ended up mostly skipping around, only stopping at the exhibits that seemed most interesting or that covered aspects of things I was unfamiliar with.

Krista also found a lot of it to be a review of things she already knew. The museum itself is very well done, but if you have much knowledge of history you probably won't learn a whole lot here.

I honestly thought that the architecture itself was the most interesting part of the tour, other than the modern "spear" that some modern architect, no doubt famous and important, ruined the original building with. The congress hall was incredibly imposing, despite being very much unfinished. The other end of the "U" is used by the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra.

We found Dad in the cafe, finishing up a coffee and a pastry. Krista and I bought drinks and we chilled for a while, deciding what to do next. We decided to walk around the lake to the zeppelin field. Dad only made it a little ways before saying he'd had enough, so we left him on a park bench overlooking the lake. There were a ton of ducks, geese, and swans in the lake; Krista got a lot of pictures.

The zeppelin field was very picturesque, in a very nazi-y way. We wandered around for a while, then headed back to Dad. We walked back to the tram stop, bought tickets, and shortly were on our way back to the hauptbahnhof.

We decided we needed a snack. We headed back into the old town, stopping almost immediately at the Pfefferstrube restaurant, in the Pillhofer hotel.

The food was phenomenal. I had Nuremberg sausages over sauerkraut, with mustard and horseradish sauces. Everything was good; the sauerkraut was by far the best I had in Germany, and probably the best I've ever had.

Dad ordered something that turned out to be raw sausage spread on bread, with red onion on top, seasoned with paprika. I don't think it was what he was expecting, but he absolutely devoured it and started musing out loud if he could recreate it at home. (The server, who of course spoke excellent English, told us that they get fresh sausage delivered daily. I'm sure there's no way serving raw sausage would be legal in the US.)

Unfortunately Krista wasn't impressed with her meal, which was some sort of bread dumpling.

Dad headed back to the hotel via Aldi (right across the street) so he could buy a snack for supper; he was done for the day.

Krista and I headed deeper into the old town - I needed to replenish my cash supply at this point, and Google was telling me there was a Deutsche Bank ATM in the market square. On the way we stopped at a shop and bought some souvenirs for Krista's friends. When we found the ATM, it was out of service - doh! I was still looking for a cookbook, so we went into a book shop on the market square. It didn't really have anything like what I was looking for.

We decided we were going to wander around the shopping streets, since we'd bypassed most of those on our tour yesterday. We found the parking garage where I'd ended up on the night we arrived. There was a department store next to it so went into that. Krista of course started looking at the pens. I found a bathroom and wondered why the attendant was glaring at me, until I realized I was supposed to tip her.

With pens in hand, we kept wandering around the old town. Krista noticed we were standing right in front of a big Deutsche Bank, so I was able to get more cash.

We went through a couple more stores. We found another bookstore; this one had exactly the book I was looking for, plus another one by the same author. I bought them both.

We decided it was time to head back towards the hotel. We'd been wandering more-or-less at random and ended up walking through the red-light district before we realized it. This was sad and a little creepy, with a lot of weird-looking men hanging around. We were both happy when we got out of it.

We sat down at a place for a little supper. After about ten minutes nobody had served us, so we got up and went back to the hotel. We dropped off our purchases in the room, then went down to the bar. We had a nice little snack, a few drinks, and reflected on what a good day it had been.

Sunday, 2019 September 29 Tuesday, 2019 October 01