One of my goals for this trip was to try to do a few things we had never done before - so in Nuremberg, we did a tour of the Rock Cut Cellars!
We didn't wake up TOO early on this day (I think the jetlag was really hitting us) but Todd went out to get us some breakfast before we headed out toward the Old Town area. The Frauentorturm, or the Women's Tower that once sat upon the city walls is pretty much the first thing you see when you enter the old town area of Nuremberg from the Hauptbahnhof.
We walked north toward the Lorenzkirche. Building here started in 1250 and was completed in 1477. It was one of the first churches in Germany to become Lutheran!
This Gothic church has a three pipe organ inside that is one of the largest in the WORLD! The rose window above (the circular one) dates back to the 14th century. It was damaged in WWII, but the pretty stained glass windows and important religious artifacts were removed prior, so they were saved.
WHY am I the shortest Bailey now??? Anyway, we always love stopping for a good picture on the Fleischbrücke as we crossed the Pegnitz.
We eventually made our way to the Nürnberger Hauptmarkt, where the market was in full swing! I mean, there's no Glühwein but the produce looked lovely!
The Schöner Brunnen was built in the very late 1300s by stonemason Heinrich Beheim is in the shape of Gothic spire and is a must see landmark in Nuremberg!
I don't even know what is going on here except that I can't see anything except that happy face at the top of this building that looks like a clown!
In the Sebalder Platz, here stood the Mortiz Chapel from 1313 until it was destroyed in the war in 1944.
I really love that they preserved the outline of this chapel. This is Nuremberg. There's a lot they could do with this space, but this is what they chose to do. It's interesting that the Moritzkapelle sat so close to Sebalduskirche (which you can see right here!) but even crazier is that there were little bratwurst kitchen stalls connected to the church that people complained about.
Here is what the space looked like (courtesy of the website https://www.petraschuster.de/) The Bratwurstglöcklein, or the Bratwurst Bell is attached to the building on the left (you can see the white table cloths of the tables here.)
Eventually, we made our way to the Hausbrauerei Altstadthof, which is the starting point to the tour of the Rock Cut Cellars of Nuremberg. This brewery still uses a part of these cellars to store some of their beer!
You meet your guide at the Hausbrauerei Altstadthof, but he does the entire tour in German so you have to pick up an audio guide if you want to learn anything in English! You CAN get an English tour, but only on certain days and we, of course, were not there on one of those days. Our guide Charly was great though - he would finish his speech in German and then tell us a little bit more in English! And you can't just get into the tunnels to see them yourself - you MUST go with a guide. From the Hausbrauerei Altstadthof, the guide takes you to where the tour actually begins at the Albrecht Durer statue in Albrecht Dürer Platz. You enter via the stairwell and one of the first things you see is a bomb from WWII, no big deal of course.
Here is Charly explaining in German how the Rock Cut Cellars were important during the time of the war as a place for residents of Nuremberg to hide during the bombings. They were also used for storing priceless works of art and artefacts.
Todd doesn't fit in this doorway, as usual! (That reads: Emergency exit, but it was also the direction of the tour!) Down here, there are about 20,000 square meters of interconnected cellars!
He literally was bent in half for a portion of the tour! (Me: "What's so hard about this? You just walk upright like normal, it's so easy!")
In the late 1300s there were about 30,000 people in Nuremberg and there were 40 BREWERIES!
If you wanted to brew beer and sell it, you had to have a cellar to store and ferment the beer (that was the law!)
As a result, when the war began and the bombings occurred, locals began to hide in these already-existing cellars. Eventually over time, the cellars were connected. During the war, they withstood the bombings because of the strength and stability of the sandstone. However, while the cellars provided protection against the bombings, there was no food, water or circulating air down here, and as a result, the citizens of Nuremberg could only stay down here for so long before they needed to get out. So they built an extension of the tunnels that led out of the city, so people could escape. Sometimes the fires in the city overhead burned for days, so the escape route was absolutely necessary. The oldest cellars (which are closest to street level) were destroyed in the 1980s to make way for a parking garage (face palm.) The deeper you go into the four levels of cellars, the newer the cellar system is.
Nuremberg sits mostly on sandstone, which although is known for it's stability, is also known to have a terrible seepage problem due to the porous nature. Because of this, they started having some structural problems with some of the buildings that sit over the cellars. They eventually placed air shafts for ventilation within the system and shored up the cellars a bit so that they eventually dried out.
Once refrigeration became more widespread, they stopped using the cellars for beer brewing purposes and started using them to store gherkins (or pickles)! It's cool enough for it at 10 degrees C (or about 50 degrees F).
The pickle storage didn't last long because by the time the war started, they not longer stored them here. This pipe shute and barrel are reminders of the time when Mr. Harrer had his pickle business down here!
Grant wants to know if these barrels contain pickles or beer?
Our guide Charly was funny - he made us keep an eye out for these giant furry spiders! In this picture, you can see how they reinforced the walls down here.
Of course, we had to check out the whiskey storage area before we emerged back into the daylight!
We learned underground that if you saw a red six pointed brewing star on a building, they brewed the traditional red beer. If the star was white, they they brewed a helles type of beer.
We watched a quick video about the brewery which was entirely in German but could listen to some info about it on our audio guide.
I loved these barrels, mostly because they all had interesting names on them.
Like... Kern! Beginning of a new friendship!
At this point, the tour was over and we were hungry! So we headed over to the Goldenes Posthorn, one of our favorite little sausage kitchens in Nuremberg. This is the self proclaimed OLDEST wine bar in all of Germany! Albrecht Dürer himself used to enjoy coming here!
This place dates back to 1498 but it unfortunately was destroyed in 1945. It was rebuilt in the same location by 1960, and thankfully, they were able to save a bunch of the historic documents and artifacts that they had stored in the restaurant (such as a glass the Albrecht Dürer used!)
It's important for at least one of us to have a Tucher beer!
Or both of us! Prost!
Todd got the sausages and kartoffelsalat! SO delicious!
I tried to be much better on this trip about taking pictures of things with my people actually IN the photo - I think I did a pretty good job!
After our tasty lunch, we walked past the Albrecht Dürer statue where we initially started our Rock Cut Cellar tour earlier that morning (you can see the signs down low behind his statue.) They laid the stone for this statue in 1828, 300 years after his death and it was the first monument to an artist in Germany! One of the coolest things about this statue is that even after Nuremberg was pretty much leveled on January 2, 1945 when the British dropped 6,000 bombs and a million incendiary devices on the city, Dürer's statue still stood. Although there was some minor damage to the base of the statue, he still stood tall among the absolute rubble that surrounded him.
We wanted to hike up to the Nuremberg Castle where these babies (and yes, even Todd) climbed on our first full weekend in Germany back in September of 2015! It's known as the Affenfelsen, or Monkey Rock!
I'm not kidding when I say it's a HIKE to this castle. If you start in the Hauptmarkt, the elevation is around 300 meters. By the time you get to the castle, which is a 7 minute walk of about 1/3 of a mile, you go up almost 40 meters!
We followed Todd straight up the hill! This elevation is, of course, one of the means of protection that the Castle had over it's 1,000 year history.
Baby girl is still smiling, even after hiking up all this way! (And look, we aren't done yet!) The gate Natalie is standing in was one that separated the Burgrave's (or administrators) Castle from the Imperial Castle.
There was a little garden area that you could see through a fence known as the Maria Sibylla Merian Garden. Maria Sibylla Merian was a well known nature scientist who lived nearby here, and used to use this garden to study flowers and insects.
I was walking around separately from these three, and I looked back to see them doing what appeared to be a photo shoot!
This was the outcome of that!! Are you kidding me? How cute is this? And how was this almost 8 years ago?
The views of Nuremberg from the Castle are unparalleled!
THIS was the most disappointing part of our trip. This picture was taken by my good, very expensive camera. The one above it was taken by an iPhone 14. Meh.
The iPhone family shot is amazing though!
We walked back through the Castle grounds one last time (next time, I promise I'll finally spend more time here and go all the way into the back of the castle!) but I always do love the half timber structures at the Burg Cafe Beer - and yes, that's the name!
I wanted to make one more stop before heading back toward the train station and that was the Weißgerbergasse.
The Weißgerbergasse is a street of medieval row homes that somehow miraculously survived the bombings of Nuremberg (particularly that one in 1945!) A group called Friends of the Old Town has continued to restore these, including the roof on this one.
The name of the street comes from the Middle Ages when the tanners who worked here would make white leather (as opposed to red leather). Weißgerbergasse literally translates to White Tanner Street. The Nuremberg tourism website says, "The white tanners processed animal skins from calves, sheep or goats with the help of alum and salt into fine, light-colored leather, which was dried at the nearby city wall." I can't imagine what THAT must have smelled like!
Grant checking out the architecture along the Weißgerbergasse (Don't forget to look up cause there's so much to see!)
And don't forget to look down! (In fact, looking down is recommended when encountering cobblestones so that you don't trip.) I love the fun manhole covers of Nuremberg!
But wait! There's more! This one includes all the geographic coordinates and is a GPS reference point!
THIS is a hilarious story. We wanted to "spin the gold ring" at the beautiful Schöner Brunnen so that our wishes would come true, but we noticed a large group of what appeared to be teenagers on the side where the gold ring was. Todd and Natalie were kind of standing near the group when they heard the guide tell them (in English) that this ring was for the locals, and there was a ring on the opposite side for people who weren't from here (which for the record, I cannot validate!)
So Todd and the kids ran over to spin the non local ring!
And as Grant is spinning the ring, you can see that whole group of teenagers came running over to spin the ring as well (thanks kid in my picture!) One of them walked by with a "Wilmington Soccer" (or some other sport) shirt on, and I don't know why, but I could just TELL they were from New England. So we walked around and I found a group of girls and asked them where they were from. They responded with "Boston" so I asked them where specifically and they said, "Wilmington!" NO. WAY. Todd graduated from Wilmington High, class of 1990! It turns out one of the chaperones of this year's high school trip was a guy that Todd used to play basketball with as a kid who graduated one year behind him! It IS a small world, indeed!
Natürlich, we headed back down to the Nuremberg Volksfest for the remainder of the afternoon (you know... AFTER we made our kids do cultural and educational activities!) Next up... beer activities! This little barrel was so cozy! I like that the Kongresshalle, the huge structure in the background that was built by (and not finished) the Nazis in 1935. They also had a big panoramic set of pictures of the Alps so that when you looked through the window of the barrel, that was what you saw. Which is, of course, much preferable to Nazi-built structures!
It wasn't THAT cold on this particular day, but it was a little breezy and the barrel kept the wind from getting to us.
I used to be able to handle the Maß but I did not have ONE single Maß the entire time I was in Germany. Only Halb Maß!
Todd: "Look, this is so artsy!"
We had given the kids money and told them to scram, but they came back anyway!
Well, it seems I have disappeared again.
After a Halb Maß (or two, which is ridiculous because you know that equals a full Maß), we decided to get back on the swings.
MUTTI! This is actually what she calls me, so it was really funny when she found this!
Creepy corn man (or Mais Man) is always a big hit at Volksfest!
Speaking of creepy, it will NEVER not weird me out to see this former Nazi Party building in the background of this fun festival. Thankfully, the Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände (say that 10 times real fast!) or the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds Museum has been in the north wing of this unfinished building since 2001, reminding us all of the horror that happened. And while the Kongresshalle looks nice on the outside (if a bit like the Colosseum in Rome because that's what it was modeled after), it's an unfinished dump inside.
We waited a while to ride this one and we were all so happy to have our own individual cars so no one felt bad about crushing someone else! This one is called the Jaguar and it gets going FAST!
Todd and I were getting a little hungry so he and the kids decided they would do one more funhouse before we took a break for dinner.
Well, it doesn't LOOK like anyone fell here.
The big tree didn't even fall!
Todd and I gave some MORE money to the kids, who wanted pretzels (or something?) and rides for dinner so we swung into the Festhalle Papert for some dinner and some... country line dancing??
Oh yes, that's exactly what we got. American country music (mostly old stuff, which I weirdly appreciated) and a bunch of people in cowboy hats line dancing! Gotta work off that schnitzel somehow!
The kids were still gone, so Todd and I finished dinner and headed back out as the sun was starting to set.
We knew we wanted to ride the Ferris Wheel (aka: Jupiter Rad) so we went in that direction.
I TOO have never had fruit on a stick! Todd and I shared one!
We didn't ride the Heidi coaster again (I keep wanting to write, "We didn't ride Heidi again" and then I realize how terrible that sounds!), but the kids were on it - you can see them here!
Todd took a picture of their picture! So creep-tastic!
You must ride the Jupiter Rad at least once, even though it's a million dollars for a family of four to ride it, because it really does provide the best pictures from up above!
The Bailey family on a Ferris Wheel!
One more shot of the dark Kongresshalle next to the bright lights of the Volksfest.
For the very last "ride" at Volksfest, the kids went with Todd into a funhouse called "Die lustigste Baustelle der Welt" or - the Funniest Construction Site in the World.
Natalie even scored a construction hat for free! Now that IS funny!
Until next time, Nuremberg - and Nuremberg Volksfest! Du bist der Beste!
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