Bamberg has been one of the places on my list for a long time. Some time ago on TV I saw a documentary of travel show of some sort about Germany. Bamberg was one of the place it showed. Famous for it's greatly preserved old town which is UNESCO heritage listed and its Rauchbier (smoked beer).

I only did a day trip here (left Nuremberg in the morning and returned that night). For whatever reason I had put the marker for the old town into my Google Maps in the wrong spot. I was walking for about 45 minutes in the wrong direction before I realised. So I ended up getting to the old town about 2 hours later than I would have liked. And a lot more exhausted also.

This put me in a little bit of a bad mood to begin with, but then I got some bratwurst, and ice cream and sat down for a bit and was feeling a bit better. Plus, it was pretty hard to stay down for long walking around Bamberg. It's such a pleasant little german town.

After seeing the sights; the Altesrathaus, the cathedral, the abbey; I finally decided it was time to try one of these smoked beers. All through out the old town there were smaller tents set up selling all sorts of things, food, beer, trinkets etc, so it wasn't hard to find somewhere selling Rauchbier.

There are two main breweries which make this beer; Schlenkerla and Spezial. I made sure to try both of them. The Spezial was amber in colour and the first I tried. It kinda smelled like bacon I guess if I were to to think of the closest thing I could compare it to. It was an interesting taste at first, but delicious once I was use to it. The Schlenkerla was a dark beer and probably even better than the Spezial. But maybe that's just because it was my second beer and I was drinking it with a pretzel.

Throughout the day I was trying to organise my transport to Prague. I was using a carpooling website where you can find people who are going the same direction as you and get a trip and just pay for a bit of the fuel. This was going to be a very cheap way to get to Prague (less than half the cost of a bus). I finally found someone and got it all sorted only for him to cancel on me later that night. So now it's the night before I need to leave and I've got nothing planned.

I tried finding someone else to carpool with but in the end had to fork out for the bus. So then on Friday I went to the Busbahnhof to catch the bus, only to find 10 minutes before my bus left that this particular bus left from out the front of the Hauptbahnhof. Luckily it was only about 5 minutes to run there, but with my backpack it wasn't easy.

But then I was on to Prague.