Nuremburg

About eight am we wake up - I can't seem to sleep through the night at the moment, always waking at two am and not sleeping again until about four or five. We have a GREAT shower, it's fitted with a tap that you can control both the temperature and the pressure with. So very good. We head downstairs for our first German buffet breakfast, and find a sumptuous feast awaiting us. There are several kinds of rolls/bread, lots of cold cuts, several very flash cheeses, fruit, cereal, eggs, little white sausages, tea, juice, and decent coffee. Same idea as Turkey but even better! Did I mention how much we love this place?

We pack the car, Willy changes the GPS TO English and sets Olga (my name for our GPS lady). I have a minor freak out about a lost cord so head back to the room and find it caught up in the blankets, then we hop back onto the Autobahn. It doesn't take long to reach Nuremberg and we head to the museum at Reichsparteitagsgelande (we think, we really only have a limited idea of where we are) which documents both the development of the Nazi party but also Nurembergs involvement. We pay our entry fee which includes the audio guide and then proceed upstairs to the start.

Having now been to war museums in NZ, England, Turkey, and now Germany, I have to say that I think the Germans have produced one of, if not the best. This is the only one where your primary language doesn't provide you any more or less opportunity to engage with the information at hand, the place is silent as both Germans and foreigners alike listen intently to their handsets, and the narration given is extremely in depth, factual, and doesn't shy away from the horrors of the Nazi regime.

Nuremberg was heavily involved with the Nazis, it contains a lot of Romanesque structures that Hitler commissioned during his time in power, it was where the massive fanatical rallies took place, where the  horrendous Nuremburg Laws outlawing Jewish citizenship were enacted, and where the Nazi leaders were tried at the conclusion of WW2. As you can expect it is a very heavy experience, alot of the imagery and information is new to me, and just before the end of the exhibition I am particularly surprised to see photographs of the executed Nazi's. At the conclusion, we step out onto a viewing platform which allows us a view over the vast courtyard of one of Hitlers mammoth buildings. It's a lot like viewing the Colloseum, it stands empty, damaged, and witness to one of humanities darkest regimes.

We leave the museum and circumnavigate the enormous structure as I dwell on the similarities between the Nazis and the Romans. It's impossible not to. The buildings, the road/parade ground, how they used the rallies a lot like the Romans used the games... It's all very interesting and my brain is still processing at a million miles an hour.

After a while we hop back in the car and drive to Hauptmarkt which is super cool, different to the market in Munich, but I like it almost as much. We wander through the cobbled streets, are wooed by the centuries old dwellings, ancient churches, and when I see an antique shop with a dollhouse in the window I drag Willy inside. I cast my eye over a variety of interesting trinkets, and I spot a commemorative book from the 1936 Olympics which of course took place under the Nazis - I continue around the corner and instead of an antique shop, we find ourselves in a WW2 collectors shop. Oops. It's quite unnerving and after some awkward conversation with the owner we excuse ourselves.

We walk through an arch in one of the cities giant medieval walls, and then return to our car. Parking costs less than four euro which is much cheaper than I expected, then we take the (very) scenic route to a hotel that I book while we are driving. We end up in a tiny village near Rothenburg where we stay in a very basic, seemingly empty guest house opposite the Franconian hotel that we thought we were staying in. Our host literally hands us a key with number four on it, walks us into the middle of the lane and points at the building - there are half a dozen doors and the number on our key doesn't relate to any of them. Thankfully we work it out without having to ask our man and we spend the last hour or so of daylight walking around this charming little village before eating at a restaurant next to the little one way stone bridge that we entered the town via.

Willy has the venison and I have the pork, both are really tasty, but not stupidly big and we head to bed happy - even though I am a little freaked out by the apparent emptiness of both the guesthouse and the town. It's very, very dark and quiet.