Monday, December 29th we woke up in Munich, ate breakfast at the hotel, then boarded a train to Nuremberg at around 11AM. The train we took was the first one to show us a speedometer. Most of the ride was around 180 km/hr, for a little bit it did reach 250 km/hr. We arrived in Nuremberg around 12:30 PM. It was was another cold and snowy day, though my only real complaint about the weather was that my shoes had gotten wet the day before. I had put them on wet in the morning and they continued to sop up slush throughout the day.
After dropping our bags off at the hotel we did some exploring in the old city. Nuremberg has a interesting looking old city; it was an important town in the middle ages, and there are still remnants of the medieval wall with guard towers, and even a castle at one corner of the old city. We walked to the castle and got a good view of everything, but it was a bit challenging to walk down from the steep, cobble stone castle hill with the snow and ice. We stopped and walked through two large churches. One had some pictures of the damage from a bombing in WWII; it was interesting to see how good of a job they had done restoring it.
The internet recommended going on an 80 minute cellar tour in the old city, which may sound strange but was actually quite interesting. The cellars were built in the middle ages for brewing beer and were sometimes up to 4 stories underground. During World War II they connected all these cellars and had an extensive network used as an air raid shelter and as an escape route in case of a city-wide fire. The tour was all in German but we got to use an English audio guide. I think we got most of the same information as the rest of the tour, but the tour guide would always talk longer than the guide, and sometimes say something to make everyone else laugh.
After doing a quick bit of shopping, we headed back to the hotel to rest a bit and dry our shoes. We then finished the day with another big German meal with good German beer.
