Days 29 & 30 Saturday & Sunday 29 & 30 April 2017

Ladies if you are deciding what the fashion is going to be for the upcoming season I suggest that you do not throw out your jeans with the holes in them.  Everybody is wearing jeans with holes in them, even some chaps.

As last night was my last Saturday night in Europe I decided I would go the whole hog, so to speak, for dinner.  Having experienced some difficulty getting into a restaurant on Friday I decided I would try a new strategy.  I will digress slightly here, on Friday and Saturday nights when the restaurants are really busy they are loath to take up a table with a single diner when they could put a couple in, I have been turned away, or ignored while they find a table for the couple behind me.  Anyway I was determined not to experience this on Saturday night, so late in the afternoon when I was walking back to my hotel I went past a restaurant where I had lunch the day before, so I went in there and made a reservation for one, gotcha!

Just changing locations down to the bar, to be continued.

Now in the bar waiting on my vodka & tonic.  So dinner on saturday night was pork shoulder and potato dumpling accompanied by kellarbier.  When you walk into the restaurant you walk past a window looking into the kitchen and in there you can see a large glass fronted oven with I reckon 50 or 60 roasted pork shoulders sitting in there.  The pork shoulder is a large lump of roast pork topped by a large lump of pork crackling, the potato dumpling is a dense ball of mashed potato all sitting in a pool of beer gravy, where can you go wrong with that.  Kellarbier is a speciality of the region and is a local brew drawn straight from the barrel located in the kellar, which is German for cellar.  This beer is served in a half litre porcelain mug probably so that you can't see how cloudy it is, but it is delicious and refreshing.  In a very large restaurant I reckon about 90% of the patrons were having the pork shoulder,

On Saturday I did a combined morning and afternoon walking tour led by our tour guide, Chris a 20 something surfer dude from the northern beaches of Sydney.  He has been living in Germany for 7 years or so.  The morning part of the tour was around the old town and was the usual array of market places, churches and castles.

Church in Nuremberg - blue skies

The afternoon involved catching a bus to the former nazi party rally grounds.  As I have mentioned before this was where Hitler and his cronies held their big propagander driven rallies and parades.  There is a documentation centre (modern museum) there as well as the unfinished nazi Congress Hall (when the congress hall was finished it was to be twice the size of the colloseum in Rome) and the Zeppelin Field where the rallies were held.  The modern day Germans are in a real quandry as to what to do with these buildings and facilities.  The original buildings on the site, congress hall and the zeppelin field grandstands are all crumbling and falling into disrepair.  The Germans want to leave these facilities as they are to show what has happened in 70 years to buildings that were supposed to last for a 1,000 years as the showpieces of the 3rd reich.  However they can't allow the buildings to deteriorate much more as they would then be unsafe.  This now becomes a political and moral minefield as they do not want to be seen to be spending money on restoring or maintaining nazi facilities.

A couple of Hitler's follies

The Germans still have real issues as to how they deal with the physical, moral and political fallout from the nazi era.  Maybe somebody should write a book about it one day.

On Sunday, continuing the nazi German theme I visited the site of the Nuremberg trials.  This involved my first foray with the Nuremberg undergound, the railway system, not a political movement.   Court room 600 at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice is where the trials of the leading Nazis took place after the end of the war.  Court room 600 is still a working court room and although the court room is laid out differently it is very easy to see how the court appeared for the trials of the leading nazis, a number of whom were executed as a result of the verdicts reached in this room.

Court rooom 600 - IMT (International Military Tribunal)

Upstairs in the roof space above the court room is a very (very) detailed display about the court, the processes and outcomes of the trials.  It is extremely well done but for the casual visitor far to detailed.  To see, watch and listen to everything would have taken many hours, so I skipped some parts that were probably important to the people who put the display together but not to me.  What is important from the Nuremberg trials is that they set the groundwork for the Nuremberg Principles that now form the basis for the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

So back out into the sunlight, beautiful day here today, sunny and about 16 degrees.  Train back into Nuremberg and Italian for lunch sitting in the sunshine on the edged of the old market square, listening to some bloke playing a piano accordian.  Now this is what European holidays are supposed to be about, not trudging through snow in dark leaden skies.

Ex Con Tiki bus I reckon

Catching the train to Frankfurt tomorrow (Monday) and then flying out of Frankfurt on Tuesday.

(wi fi is really slow for posting pics, more pics to come)