I'm falling behind on these blog entries. I'm in Prague right now, but must write about Nuremberg and Bamberg first before I forget what I did there. It's almost already a week ago that I first arrived in Nuremberg.

So I left Dresden on Tuesday morning to catch the bus to Nuremberg. It was about a 4 hour trip and I pretty well slept for most of it which was nice. I was around lunch time when I got into Nuremberg. My first order of business was to find the hostel which was easy enough, it was only a 15min walk from the main station. Then I just decided to walk around for a bit.

I'm not really sure what much I can say. The photos of this place kinda say it all I guess. The old town of Nuremberg is amazing, and still has several km of the wall going halfway around it, which then also has the dry moat outside of that. The moat was never filled with water, and nowadays you can even walk down into it (some subway stops are actually in the moat, So all that's pretty cool. Gives you a bit of a feel of what it would have been like living in a medieval town with a wall.

Then of course there are a bunch of churches, cathedrals and the castle. I didn't bother going as far as the castle on this first day. But just walking around the town was nice.

The next day I was actually planning on going to Bamberg, but by the time I figured out which train to take the next one was an hour away and I figured I was try again the day after. So this day, I decided to go up to the castle.

This castle was far better than Konigstein. It had amazing views of the city, but more importantly it had a great museum on the inside. THe first part was a historical tour of Nuremberg and its importance during the Holy Roman Empire. During the first half of the HRE it didn't actually have a capital city and the king travelled around from place to place wherever he needed to dispense justice and such. But then they eventually separated the justice system from the monarch and the days of the travelling king were over and Nuremberg became the place that the first diet was held whenever a new king was elected.

After this was an awesome medieval weapon and armour display. Again I can probably just let the photos do most of the talking here. Suffice to say this is kinda what I was hoping for in the konigstein armoury. It also turned out that most of the items here were taken from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum which apparently has one of the largest and most important collections of weapons and armour in Germany. This place was right around the corner from my hostel, so that's where I went next.

This place was pretty huge, and a maze. 5 stories tall, but the higher up you went, the less connected the rooms became. For example, the top floor only had 3 exhibit rooms, but to get between them you first had to go back down to the second floor, walk to the other side and then go back up. But this really did have a great display of weapons and armour, among other things.

One such thing was the world's oldest surviving globe. This was really interesting because it was made before the Americas were discovered and many scholars of the day had calculated the circumference of the earth to be about half what it actually is (which is weird because I'm pretty sure the Greeks had already figured it out accurately a few thousand years earlier). They also had another globe done only a fews later which did include the Americas. Fascinating stuff.

That night I had dinner with Ren, a guy from Brooklyn who was staying in the same hostel. We went to a microbrewery which did great beer and food. It was a good night. He was out the next morning before I was even up, but he was nice enough to leave me an extra pillow case he had, which was a topic that had come up in conversation the night before back at the hostel between us and a pommy guy. I only wish I had a pillow case back in Dresden to folder the pillow up into. Anyway, Ren is apparently in Prague now too, so I'm going to try and catch up with him again if I can.

On Thursday I went to Bamberg. This will be another blog entry.