December - part III - in which I made acquaintances with Bavaria.

Well, I've done very little traveling around Bavaria (Bayern) since I've been here.  Some friends were going to explore Nürnberg and Bamberg for a day so I jumped in.  In Germany you can buy train tickets that let you travel through a whole Bundesland ("state" for lack of a better translation) for up to 5 people for a whole day at only 29€ in all.  We started with Nürnberg, of which I had only seen the Christmas market and the soccer stadium before.  The artist Albrecht Dürer who painted the famous "praying hands" was from Nürnberg, so we saw his house briefly.  

We noticed a number of rather dark statues around town including a giant rotting rabbit... still don't know what it's all about.

The inner city has a wall around it dating back to quite a long time ago, with this fortress at one side of it.

It's up on a hill so you can see over all the buildings in the city from there (though only a small feat since the buildings are all short).  I failed at photographing that though.  I actually failed at photos most of the day.  Apologies!

Here we went up on a balcony to get good view of the Christmas market.. all we got was red and white stripes though..

After a good meal we made our way to Bamberg, which turns out to be a pretty legitimate city in it's own right.  It was cool to see after dark, they have some churches and castles up on the hill sides that have spotlights on them, only from the city side though.  As we trekked up to each of them, we found the back sides in darkness, and the front sides glowing brilliantly.  There is a nice part of the city that is compared to Venice, but it was tough to see in the dark.  I'll have to go again later.

Once we had our fill of Bamberg we headed home to Erlangen for some dinner and then visited another intern, Lisa for Christmas tea and brownies and a few violent rounds of Jungle Jam, a card game that requires laying down cards at top speeds until certain combinations come up and then lunging for the totem sitting in the middle of the table, and often effectively wrestling for it to win.  The wounds on my hands have healed though now.

 - that's all.  Christmas today was delightful.  I like my family.  Cheers.