Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Day 2 - Nuremberg + Munich Residenz

we were close to the rock
next to the dead jelly fish and shell
and a sweetie glow came
Spin Out - Hayden Besswood

The plan was for day 2 was to spend the morning in Nuremberg and the afternoon exploring Munich Residenz. A rather weird plan perhaps, why not the whole day in Nuremberg or a whole day in Munich? Surely there are things to do to occupy the entire day. Well, I don't always make the best decision. I usually try to explore as many different places as possible in the countries I visit, so that's how it went. To maximize the time, I needed to get to Nuremberg fast and the option for that is to take the ICE train, which is the faster and more expensive train. Annoyingly ticket price is not uniform and fluctuates depending on the date and time. I don't know why I get annoyed when it's exactly the same with airline ticket. Basically if you need to take German ICE train, book as early as you can. Looking at the cheapest pricing that I could wake up to, the schedule was to take the 06:47 train from Munich, arriving at 07:53 in Nuremberg (side note: I have this weird thing of wanting to call Nuremberg, Nurkie, in short). Then I would take the 13:01 train from Nuremberg, arriving in Munich at 14:06. The cheaper train would take longer time than that. 06:47 is hella early, seriously there were a number of days in this trip I woke up at 05:00 AM because I take a long time to get ready. Also seriously, I think I only wake up that early during vacation. In real life, I don't do that - really not a morning person. Anyways, got on the train and arrived in Nuremberg without any issue. Nuremberg main train station has like a mall attached to it. It's also busy like Munich main train station, but Munich main train station feels more chaotic. First order of business was to find the toilet - found it and was rather dismayed that you have to pay. Can I just put it on record here that I cannot with this whole paying for toilet thing in Europe and I come from Indonesia where you do sometime give money to use the toilet, but not in a mall-like place or places where you expect the toilets to come with the facilities and never with an actual barrier to stop you from using a toilet without paying no matter how high-tech they want to make it that you can pay with your card. I just don't understand the reasoning or the cultural thing in Europe. It never stops to annoy me when I encounter this. Okay enough rant.

Arriving in Nuremberg train station, one thing that somehow I didn't expect was how Nuremberg feels like a big city. I actually thought it would be a small town, but I think aside for the old town, it's like any other city? After finding my bearing from the main station, I started my walk by crossing the street to get to the other side - such a funny unnecessary sentence there :D One interesting thing about Nuremberg is perhaps the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds museum, but I read it's being renovated and it's kinda out of the way, you couldn't walk there, so I decided to give this a miss. The plan for the day was to walk to Nuremberg Castle passing along several interesting things I had noted in my map, visit the castle, then walk back to the station also passing several other interesting things. The first point of interest is the Way of Human Rights which has pillars of the universal human rights. There's also a wall with the list of these human rights. Each pillar is inscribed with one item in different languages. I actually did not know what the list of the universal human rights contain and it felt good reading it. Perhaps the most interesting points for me are Entitlement to protection of privacy and Right to rest and leisure.

Below are some of the other things I passed on the way to the castle. It was a cloudy morning that turned into the drizzle as the morning went on. The church is the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady).

I arrived at the castle just after opening time, 09:00 AM. Honestly I wasn't that excited to visit the castle, I just thought I needed to fill time. There is a well in the castle that seems interesting so I was kinda interested about that. When I got the ticket, the staff gave it to me under reduced price. I asked why reduced? He said because the well wasn't available that day. Urgh, I'm not sure if it's because of the weather that day or other reason. Oh well, some things are just not meant for you. So in I went to the castle. It's not very big and it's medieval looking. One of the first thing you enter into is the chapel and then there's exhibitions about the history of the castle and also some armory and weapons. The armory part reminded me of Edinburgh Castle and even there I was like mildly interested. Being early, there were not many visitors. There was an elderly man in front of me, we were together in the chapel and he went ahead of me and then I lost sight of him after that. I wondered what happened, he didn't linger in the rooms long and just left? In one of the room, I could feel the staff was looking at me intently as I was walking around. I was like, please don't let this be some bad racial profiling and please don't be mean if he's going to ask me to stop taking photo with you actually can do. Then I felt him walking and following behind me. I seriously felt uneasy. Then I heard, "What is that?" I was like huh, what? I looked at what I was holding, just my camera. "A chicken?", he asked. What? Then I realized he was looking closely at the llama keychain on my bag :D He said he's been looking at it :D I said it's a llama from Peru. I was so glad it's something harmless and something that I could laugh about.

When I finished the castle and got out, there's a light drizzle but I had umbrella at the ready and a winter coat on (learned my lesson from the day before) so I didn't feel too cold. The thing about the crazy plan to Zugspitze - it caused me to bring the winter coat and that came in handy for the rainy days in Germany like that day. I also had the chance to wear the beanie I crocheted. The next day I found out that the ridge that I did actually made a dent in my forehead when I took the beanie off, so that is so not cute but it felt good being able to wear what I made :D Anyways, umbrella at hand I decided to explore the castle garden which was empty except for me because yeah it's kinda silly walking around a garden in the rain. The buildings below are part of the castle.

After that, I continued on walking around trying to see the points of interests I had in my map. There's definitely moments of being lost in the rain. One thing I didn't realize during my studying of Nuremberg is that there's quite a number of bridges here. Google maps tell me it's the Pegnitz river that's running through it. The bridges from top to bottom are: Maxbrücke, Karlsbrücke, and the wooden one is the Hangman's Bridge.

In Nuremberg, I managed to eat the three small sausages in a bread. Maybe I was hungry, but I like it a lot. It was good. I didn't care much for the bread and that's where I wished I was travelling with my family or good friends because we could return back to the stall and buy more without me having to be embarrassed. I wonder if you could just buy the grilled sausages without the bread. Again with my people, I wouldn't be embarrassed to ask. Also something that I got to eat was pretzel filled with nutella. That was the only pretzel I had in Germany and I don't know if it's the same common pretzel as the others. Seeing pretzels, I just thought the texture is rather hard so I wasn't interested and I was apprehensive, but my nutella pretzel was soft and it's good. Well everything with nutella is good. This last picture is from St. Lorenz Church (St. Lawrence). I think it's the only church that I entered in Nuremberg. For other Nuremberg pictures, please go here. The pictures that I took have not been good, it's embarrassing. I did even worse with rainy cloudy days :(

Back in Nuremberg main station, I found out the train was coming in late. Gosh even the more expensive ICE train is not spared of delay. So I just waited in the train station, watching the so many people around. An older lady kinda confused me when she's trying to tell me something that I obviously could not understand. Turned out she wanted my empty water bottle. She's collecting them and that moment kinda reminded me of Singapore with the elderly still needing to do work like this. Anyways, train delay changed my plan a bit; initially the plan was to visit Munich Residenz museum and its treasury, but fearing I will ended up rushing, I decided to forgo the treasury. I got to Munich Residenz without much issue. Google maps indicated I was right there. The issue was where the hell the ticketing building is, arrrghh. Got a bit confused about this and had to walk unnecessarily here and there, but I found it. Copy - pasting from Wikipedia, The Residenz in central Munich is the former royal palace of the Wittelsbach monarchs of Bavaria. The Residenz is the largest city palace in Germany and is today open to visitors for its architecture, room decorations, and displays from the former royal collections. So it's rooms and rooms of many things as seen below. Statues, porcelains, vases, chandeliers, paintings, tapestries, lavish wall decorations, chapels (yes, there's more than one), you name it. Even a grotto decorated with seashells as seen below.

I read about people getting bored in the Residenz that they took the shorter route. You do see signs of shorter route (faster to the exit) and longer route. I took the longer route. I didn't mind it at all, tired as I was. I was like okay show me what's else, what's more though of course I didn't see everything in great detail. For pictures from the Residenz, you can go here. After the Residenz, the initial plan was to explore the English Garden but I didn't think I could make it there and back so I decided to drop that and walk to Marienplatz and then walk back to my hotel. There's a lot of walking that day, I clocked in more than 27,000 steps. I don't know how I did it and didn't know I had it in me. I was tired and there was pain, like when I bowed to tie my shoelace there was sharp pain that I had to bend and get down to do it. I think it's the walking without sitting down and carrying the backpack, but through it all somehow I kept going. Anyways, in Marienplatz there's the Rathaus-Glockenspiel / Clock Tower and I saw a lot people were waiting in front of it. So I thought it's perhaps going to perform soon - totally didn't remember it would do so at 5 pm and then it happened. At first the characters on the top were moving and when it's done, I thought that's it. I was about to leave, but the bottom characters started appearing and an uncle I didn't realize was standing next to me said something like, wait, there's another one. We ended up talking because he's friendly. He's Austrian who's been living in Germany for sometime. Told him I'm an Indonesian who live in Singapore. He likes Bali, Jakarta not so much, and he thinks Singapore dollar is strong :D I think he may have explained the clock a bit, but I forgot what he said. This kinda unexpected encounter is really nice. I don't get this a lot because I'm unfriendly but when it happened I do treasure it a lot. Side note: there's a line in the book that I'm reading currently, unfriendliness is another form of camouflage. Anyways, ended the day with roast pork and potato dumpling dinner. The potato dumpling was new to me but not bad. Didn't finish the roast pork because they're kinda tough and the portion was too much for me. Contemplated if I should have beer, in the end I did not even though the restaurant was just next to my hotel. Didn't have beer at all in fact in Germany. Did I miss out? Maybe, but I don't feel regret about it :)

:) eKa @ 8:58:00 PM •