Nermberg

No this is not a typo – this seems to be how German speakers pronounce Nuremberg, so I’m going with it.

This was my view on waking this morning… a little less picturesque than past days, but if I’m honest, my memory of Nuremberg from 14 years ago was not favourable, so I wasn’t expecting too much of today.

Nuremberg is pretty big and spread out, so a bus was necessary to take us around to see all the important buildings/sites.

First was the Rally Ground where AH gave his speeches from and the Nazi soldiers marched in front.

This is the front… Last time we came here, we got off the bus and looked around. There had been a music festival there the previous day/weekend and Jenny stepped on chewing gum. That pretty much summed up our feeling of being there.

This is the side (the toilet blocks) behind that hill is a sports field now.

And…. this is the back of the grandstand…

Then once we drove past the court building where the Nuremberg trials were held and the guides gave us heaps of information (all quite interesting) about the trials, we got to the old town – a walled city and neither Jen nor I had any memory of it. We couldn’t have gone there last time.

The church in the main square is pretty special. Everything in Nuremberg was bombed – about 90% was destroyed, including most of this church…

… except the middle part with the lower orange roof – that’s original.

It is called St Sebald’s Church and was built in about 1215. Saint Seb is a bit of a mystery, but the story goes that he was a hermit and was involved in a few miracles – healing the blind, a bit of missionary work and the people of Nuremberg loved him.

This building is opposite the church and the square in between them is the old cemetery. The graves and headstones were moved to a cemetery outside of the town centre when the plaque hit them to try and stop contamination.

This house used to be owned by one wealthy family (but now houses many different businesses). Back in the day, you weren’t allowed to have obvious ornate decorations on your house, you had to keep everything low key and not show off…

And then the government built this… This pic only shows about 1/5 of the building – it was huge and there were 4 doorways like this with carvings of historical men lounging with different animals…. pretty subtle, I thought.

Part of the 10% of the city that survived was this one street of old houses…

The bay windows on these houses were used for alters. They were also a bit of a status symbol. If the owner ever sold their house and moved, they could take their window with them. Some were wooden and a little easier to take off, but some were cemented on.

One of the things our cruise director told us is that there is a competition between Nuremberg and the next town Regensburg about who has the best sausage in bread. It’s a special thing here (I can’t remember the name) but it’s 3 little finger sausages in a dinner roll with mustard with/or without sauerkraut.

We were going to try Nuremberg’s today and Regensburg’s tomorrow and give our verdict.

Jen had a taste and decided to get a crepe with lemon and sugar. I didn’t mind it.

The main square in the centre of the Nuremberg old town has this huge church with a clock that has characters that spin around at 12 noon. The square itself is full of market stalls – mainly food, some plants & flowers.

Then around the edge are cafes and chocolatiers… We went for one serving glühwein, thank you very much.

So Nuremberg has turned out to be quite pretty and tasty and I’m happy about that.

This was our meeting place to get back to the bus… they call this the beautiful fountain because as our guide told us… it is both beautiful, and indeed… a fountain.

We are at that stage of our lock system journey that we are at the top, which means that tonight we are going into a lock 81 feet high (24.7 metres)

The captain made a special allowance for us all to go up on the roof deck once we were inside the lock to have a look and watch as we rose to the top.

This was the view from the front of the ship heading towards to lock – you can see how tall it is.

Then once we were inside, it was really eery. A bit like we were on some futuristic spacecraft? I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. The walls are damp, there’s no cold breeze, everyone is silent, so all you can hear is the water rushing in. It’s echo-y… (Maybe it’s not so hard to explain 🤷🏼‍♀️)

Then we were at the top and on our way. It was really cool to experience. Recommended. 5 stars.