Nothing Says Love Like a Bucket of Cheese

Auf Deutsch:
Heute war ich zum ersten Mal in Nürnberg. Marty und ich sind dort gefahren, der Stadt zu erforschen. Er fährt wöchentlich nach Nürnberg, eine Besprechung anwesend zu sein. Aber es gefällt mir, Nürnberg zu besuchen!

Zuerst sind wir zum Kaiserberg gestiegen. Der Blick über der Altstadt war wunderschön! Dann sind wir durch die Stadt gewandert. Nürnberg ist bekannt für schönen Kirchen und einen jährlichen Kristkindl Markt. Auch hat der Künstler Albrecht Dürer da gewohnt. Leider hat Nürnberg auch eine Geschichte mit den Nazis, und im Zweite Weltkrieg war es fast ganz zerstören. Aber heute gibt es viele Denkmal zu der Vergangenheit in Nürnberg.

Das Wetter war sonnig, aber ein Bisschen kühl. Wir haben einen schmackhaften Mittagessen bekommt, und später haben wir eine heisse Schockolade getrunken. Wir hatten viel Spaß in Nürnberg!

In English:
Today I went to Nürnberg for the first time. Marty and I drove there to explore the town. He travels to Nürnberg weekly for a business meeting, but I was happy to visit it today!

First we climbed up to the castle, Kaiserberg. The view of the Old Town was gorgeous! Then we wandered through town. Nürnberg is known for beautiful churches and an annual Kristkindl Markt. Also, the artist Albrecht Dürer lived there. Sadly, Nürnberg also has a history with the Nazis, and during WWII was almost completely destroyed. However, today there are many memorials to the past in Nürnberg.

The weather was sunny, although a little cool. We had a tasty lunch, and later we drank hot chocolate. We had a lot of fun in Nürnberg!

It was interesting to see a town that was almost completely rebuilt after WWII. Many of the cities here were all but destroyed, but Nürnberg was particularly hard hit due to the presence of munitions factories and the big parade grounds. Most cities we have visited rebuilt their Old Towns so that they look like they did before the war, and Nürnberg appears to be no exception. The Old Town is built around the Hauptmarkt, a space similar to Marienplatz in Munich, and most of the buildings appear to be very old although I understand they were mostly rebuilt after the war. The Hauptmarkt is where the Kristkindl Markt takes place each year from late November to Christmas. This is a huge market selling Christmas decorations and other holiday items. (Nürnberg and Munich have perhaps the most famous Kristkindl Markts in Germany.)

The Kaiserberg castle is a nice easy climb from the Old Town. It stands at one corner of the city walls, and you can climb up in the tower to see all of Nürnberg. We walked around the grounds for a little while and then started a self-guided walking tour through town, using our Lonely Planet guide book.

Wine appears to be more prevalent in Nürnberg than beer. It is in the region known as Franconia, although it is considered politically a part of Bavaria. So at lunch we had wine instead of beer. I never drink wine in Munich unless I am at an Italian restaurant. It is such a beer city. We had a nice lunch at an old-fashioned restaurant right on the river (actually it stands right out in the middle of the water).

Later on, after a few hours of walking, we had a wonderful afternoon hot chocolate and cake at the Café Kröll right on the Hauptmarkt. They had about a hundred different gorgeous cakes on the premises, and served their hot chocolate in little individual silver pots with a saucer of whipped cream right beside them. Oh, it was just heavenly. We had a little trouble figuring out how to order, but the people we were sitting with (strangers, naturally, this is southern Germany after all) were helpful and friendly.

We had planned to eat dinner at one of the famous Nürnberg wurst houses, but after the cake and hot chocolate we were so full that we didn't think we could wait long enough to have dinner and still get back to Munich at a reasonable hour. Especially since Marty is leaving on a two-day business trip at 5 AM tomorrow morning. So we decided to return to Nürnberg sometime for the wurstl. I do love them, the Nürnberg style of wurst are these tiny little pork sausages, grilled. You can get them at several places here in Munich too. They are so tasty. You order them simply by the number. Eight or twelve, maybe. Or for a table of several people, you might order 100. They're very good.

Finally, here's something funny that happened in Nürnberg today. When we first arrived, we passed several signs for "Fischtage," or Fish Days, apparently some kind of local festival. Neither of us like fish much, so we didn't pay much attention. But later I saw a man walking through town carrying a yellow bucket full of cheese (Käse). Naturally, that caught my eye. Then I saw a woman on another street with the same thing. After we'd been walking around for a couple of hours, we had seen about ten people carrying buckets of cheese. I was going crazy trying to figure out where they were coming from. After all, I love cheese.

At last we asked a man where he'd gotten the cheese ("Entschuldigung, woher kommt die Käse?"), and we discovered that he had gotten it at Fischtage, which was on an island in the river that runs through the Old Town. At this point, Marty later told me, he "knew we were coming home with a bucket of cheese."

We went hunting for the Fischtage and it wasn't hard to find. Today was the last day of a weeklong festival of food, apparently. There were bunches of booths selling everything from Lebkuchen to sugared nuts (Gebrannte Mandeln or burnt almonds with sugar are a big favorite around here). And, of course, lots of fish. But finally we came to an area where there were several big trucks pulled up with the sides standing open. Inside the trucks were crates and crates of food, like you might see in a grocery supply truck. One truck had fruits and vegetables, one had every kind of pasta, and another had all kinds of packaged foods from cookies to coffee. There were men in each truck throwing out these items into the crowd, and people standing up at the front with shopping bags open, just getting food dumped into them. It was a madhouse. And so funny. Some of the guys on the trucks had microphones and they were providing running commentary as they unloaded all this food into the crowd.

Over on the other side, I saw the cheese truck. All painted yellow, just like the yellow buckets. In it, a guy was filling up these buckets with all different types of cheese and then selling them to the crowd for 10 Euro a bucket. He kind of put on a show as he was loading up the buckets, naming each cheese and joking about it with the crowd. He would prepare about six buckets every three minutes or so and sell them off, then start over. I didn't have to wait very long before I got to the front of the crowd and got mine. And yes, I paid 10 Euro for what appears to be at least 30 Euro worth of cheese. It was the deal of the day! And then I had my very own cheese bucket to carry around, too.

We didn't try to catch any of the free food, although as we were leaving a packet of coffee practically hit Marty and so we ended up with that. As we were walking away from the Fischtage, I looked back and saw a man up on top of a truck, twenty feet up, chucking off heads of iceberg lettuce into the crowd. It was really one of the strangest and most entertaining things I had ever seen.

Then we came home and had leftover Katynka's pot roast for dinner. Yum. All in all, a very enjoyable day.

I have a busy start to the week coming up, with a lot of errands and possibly lunch with a German friend tomorrow. I hope to get some more pictures of Nürnberg up in the next couple of days though, so stay tuned. I did take several, but I haven't had time to download them all from the camera yet to see how they turned out.