Day Seven – Nuremburg

While Thore had to get up at the crack of 7:30am for work at Siemens (where he was at work completing a project for his thesis), Alex and I chose to sleep in, catching up on all of the sleep that we had missed on the train we had taken the night before – as well as from two very long days of visiting Munich and Berlin. We in fact were so good at ‘catching up’ that we slept in until sometime later than 2pm!

Finally getting up though, we had showers (which required moving a skillet or two) and prepared for a light afternoon of visiting the old city with Thore’s roommate Rebekah.

Rebekah, a student from Hamburg, was happy to show us around and also glad that we were not actually dead as she feared. We walked into town which turned out to be a pretty short walk (maybe 10 mins) and passed under the fortification wall towards the castle.

The castle, circa 1000AD, was situated at the top of a humongous hill and given the rather warm weather we were debating it’s value climbing up. However, while we were initially skeptical, we were quickly turned around. Being so high the wind coming through the courtyard was really fantastic. Looking out from the top we could see the entire of the south side of the city. Our wonderful guide, Rebehak, informed us that the view of the other side of the castle, although requiring a bit more climbing, was even better and trusting her judgement this far we climbed on over.

Walking across the courtyard we saw numerous university students who had also made the climb up to the top of the castle just to read a book or study for a course at the local university. I very really envious, I must say, since Kingston (where I went to school) has no castles on top of hills with amazing vistas to look out from. But, rather than be sore about it I whipped out my camera and started shooting a few panoramic sets. I could have stayed up there for a long time I think, letting the cool breeze hit my face and looking out across the town. We didn’t stay too long though as there was a pub back down in the old city that Rebehak wanted to show us that produced it’s own beer.

Arriving at the brew pub, we sat out on the patio in between some century old fairy tale houses and I enjoyed a well crafted weisse beer. As for food, I asked Rebekah what I should go for and she wholeheartedly encouraged me to try the Schnitzel. I’ve got to say, the beer and food was really good. I thoroughly enjoyed both and a big thanks to Rebekah for pointing me to them! After we had finished our meals the three of us paid our bills and started back towards the apartment. Rebekah had to be home as she was expecting a customer to arrive to purchase a record (she has her own record label with many Metal bands signed on from a number of different countries) and also so that we could meet up with Thore who would be finishing up with work and looked forward to having a few beers to celebrate the end of a big project he was involved in at Siemens.

When Thore arrived home we went off to the supermarket and foraged for some grub as well as a few beers. As in Munster, I let Thore do all of the choosing on the beer front as I was sure that he would make some pretty good choices. He pointed me to some Rattler beer (beer with lemonade in it) and also to a noname brand. What I mean about noname brand is that it is a company which produced beer, but spends no money on advertising and has no brand name for the beer. There were two flavours to this beer, one that was allowed for export and another that could only be found within Germany. Naturally I didn’t want to discriminate, so we got one of each and went home to make our dinners.

I can’t quite recall what it was that Thore and I made up for dinner, but I do recall that it involved meat and little else. Either way it was pretty good and I think even Alex, who is a vegetarian, was a bit jealous. For the rest of the evening we enjoyed our beers and conversed about many more cross cultural elements, using the web to illustrate some of our points.

Alex, for her contribution from England, chose to show us some of the Mitchell and Web shorts from British TV, Thore pulled up some Klaus Safety Videos (search German Forklift Safety video in YouTube and be amazed) and I contributed Rick Mercer’s Talking to Americans. We all had a good laugh watching these videos and while Alex was having a side conversation with Rebehak, Thore and I swapped stories about all of the devious things that we had gotten up to as irresponsible teenagers.

It was quite remarkable, really. Although we were thousands of miles apart, our childhoods were quite similar! All across the world, it would seem, boys will be boys, fashioning potato canons, tearing around on bikes and generally being pretty rowdy.

This is how it went on for the remainder of the evening, chatting and enjoying one another’s company until it was time for bed. It wasn’t the busiest day we had, but I would say that it was really quite fun to just hang out!