Hilton Nuernberg Nuremberg

... We walked down the Weissgepbergasse (with the oldest remaining buildings in the city), we passed the former home of painter Albrecht Durer, we drank some Mokarabia, climbed the castle, found a traditional Bavarian coat for Pam, and then, since Germany is full of Turkish immigrants, I finally had some Turkish street food. After shooting off an email to some extended family in Frankfurt with some initial plans ...

... in a TOY museum, what else would you expect?). After goofing off for the time we had in the museum, we headed back out on the town and explored the shops. Nuremburg has all kinds of little stores to pop in and out of (be careful though, if you are playing with a doll on a spring, you WILL be yelled at, I would know) and me and some of the rest of the group do plan on going back. After we ate a quick dinner (I had a steak-type sandwich and it was YUMMY) we hopped back on the train ...

Today, right after breakfast, we crossed the European Continental Divide. We went into a lock that dropped us down 81 ft. At the bottom it was, as our tour guide said, like being a spider in a bathtub with concrete walls rising up just inches from the sides of the ship.
We docked at ...

... There was even an ex hab on the team (Andre Nasredine) who scored a goal for us! To make the night even better we won 6-2 with some awesome goals and awesome saves!

Very happy with our decision to return to Nuremburg for the hockey game we left the following morning for Vienna. It was a long trip so we cut it in half and spent a night in Linz, Austria. Another gorgeous place to pass right on through!

From Munich to Nuremberg is a nice short drive and luckily Germany doesn't use road tolls (They are so efficient they don’t need tolls…hehe)! We chose a nice little campsite just outside the city! After going for a walk we also discovered we were next to the Football (soccer) stadium and the Hockey Arena. On our first night there was a football game and Nuremburgs local team has one hell of a ...

... had two transfers, at Ansbach and Steinach, getting in at 10 till 7. On a solemn note, at breakfast I had my back to the TV, trying to ignore CNN, but I heard there was a school shooting in Ansbach, Germany in Bavaria. I told Erin that was one of our train transfer stops today, but we didn't notice anything unusual the 7 minutes we were there.

At Rothenburg we had a 15 minute walk from the station to our hotel in the middle of town, loaded down with ...

... to get a ticket to Jena, the ticket machine brought me no joy so i joined the silver haired folk in the ticket queue (these silver haired folk are might alert to any attempted queue skipping and are EXTREMELY teratorial. I didn't attempt to skip but i witnessed one unfortunate who did...not a pretty site...he didn't get far. I finally got to talk to an assistant, who of course spoke perfect English..putting ...

... foreigners with a stick when they ask politely if they need any help 6/ phoning neighbours to complain about the noise of their lawn mower/children or other 7/ getting drunk and throwing their furniture around their flat or shouting upstairs 8/ getting hold of their neighbours keys while they are out on holiday or shopping) and letting themselves in for a nose around 9/ spying on neighbours and ...

... normally is returning, I’ve gotta find a new place, but I really have grown to love my location and room. It’s tough to find a furnished apartment for cheap in the center of town. Hopefully it works out (and in the meantime he told me I can stay an extra month in his room!)

The rest of the last few weeks aren’t really worth mentioning. Teaching classes, going to work, ripping my pants in my bike chain on the way to work ...

... just been taking a couple of snaps of the English being their usual afable, racist selves, then when things started to get a little nasty and the police moved in, we used our lack of England shirts and general scrufy apperance to slip around the side of the police line and that's how we ended up in the middle. The Germans were actually quite surprised to find the road blocked by the police. They seemed even more bemused that a few hundred England fans were giving them some lyrical ...