When we got off the train we stopped to look at this huge stone map of Nürnberg on the wall and this guy comes up and asks us, in German, if we were lost. In my best and limited German I asked, "Do you speak English?" And he gave the standard European answer, "A little bit." Anyway, his name was Charley and he showed us, on the map, where we would find a hostel and off we went. We took a wrong turn but a little old lady, who spoke no English, pointed us in the right direction. The building used to be the stables for the Keiser. They must've been a lot shorter in those days. The woman at the desk gave us "the suite" which turned out to be a private room with its own bathroom. Whoo-hoo!
We walked around the old town and ate at an outdoor café that had a ton of flowers around it. And just around the corner was this huge church. In fact, around almost every corner was a huge church.
On the second day, we checked out some more WWII stuff. We went to the memorial at Zeppelinwiese Field. Here's what it looked like in the late 1930's. Nürnberg was Hitler's planned new capital for Germany. So there's an unfinished Congress building, a parade field, and Zeppelinwiese field which has huge grandstands and can hold over 200,000 people. The city still uses Zeppelinwiese field for various spectator events you can see the large stone grandstands in the background of this racing picture. They don't use the rest of the grandstands (the overgrown portion) instead they put up metal fold-away stands. When we were there, they were breaking-down from a recent Indy-style race. Here's a shot of me standing at the speaker's platform.
We were so glad that we decided to stay in Nürnberg the extra day. We walked all over the old town and spent the evening at another outdoor café sipping different biers and watching all the people.
The next day we caught the train to Ansbach where Mum and Dad picked us up. From there we went to Sondernohe where my brother lived for about three or four years. It's such a small town that everyone knows Paddy. We were only going to drive through and look but everyone we met insisted we stay for a drink, or snacks, or even dinner. It was a beautiful little village nestled in the mountains and since the weather was so nice that day, we ended up eating outside. We had three different homemade pizzas. One had ham and lots of veggies including artichoke hearts. Another was salami and sausage. The last was like our supreme pizza but also had bite-size octopus meat on it. They were all delicious!
We arrived at our hotel very late that evening. Paddy made the reservation telling the hotel we would arrive around eight but with everyone's generosity we didn't arrive until close to midnight. In fact, the clerk was shutting off lights and locking up when we did get there. Any later and I think we would've been shut-out!