22 Juli-- Day 28

Immediately after class, MC, G, and I left for Bamberg. It's a, I hesitate to call it a city... a rather large town in the north of Bayern (Bavaria) It's maybe 100 km north of Nürnberg, where I was with M. We decided to be a little luxurious (and also because we had no other options), and take an ICE train -- intercity express-- which got us there in about 4 hours.

Street in the city center

Bamberg is yet another Middle Ages city, but this one had like 5+ huge churches, so it's much more interesting. The first night, we wandered around the town. There's this card that you can buy from their tourism center, which is only €9. For that you get unlimited rides on the bus (which is enough to make up for the price) as well as discounted or free admission to museums. Such a good investment. We managed to wander though much of the old city that night. We saw the Domplatz, where there's a huge Dom (cathedral) and this huge place called the Neue Residenz. Really cool- we went there the next day.

Domplatz

Pretty religious town, I gotta say.

After walking around and looking at a bunch of old churches and buildings, and very cute little streets, we decided to get food. Everything closed at 6... but it seemed like much earlier... the sky never seems to get really dark. A chunk of the town is on an island, and there's lots of bridges. There's even a place called Little Venice.

Part of the bridge. Guess someone had a sense of humor.

We found this street where there were lots of breweries and what Germans call "kneipes"... which are these sort of informal restaurants, where you can sit inside or outside and eat pretty standard food. Everything in Bamberg is "frankish"-- we tried the frankish specialities.... very heavy heavy food. I swear to god after I ate it, my food just sat there. Probably set up its chairs and settled in for the night. There were the Bayerisch potato dumpling things... which again are just very very squishy potatoes, and meat.

We also tried this stuff called "rauchbier"... which literally translates to "smoke beer". It's some sort of Bamberg speciality... not sure what they do to it, but it tastes like smoke. Or rather, to me, it tasted like it had a ham aftertaste. I stuck to my real people beer... There's also a wine specialty called "frankenwein", which we also tried. Honestly, it wasn't as spectacular as I thought it would be. However, I had tried that right after I had tried the rauchbier... so maybe my palate was just mixed up with the taste of ham.

You know you're in Bayern when...

There was a permanent sort of open air market, where I snapped that lovely photo above. We'll come back to this open air market tomorrow morning.

You know you're in an old town when... the streets look like this.

We had figured that since we shelled out like €10 more, while the hostel across the street was all booked up, we would use their sauna + fitness center that they 'advertised'. Wrong. Couldn't. It consisted of a turned off sauna, a bed + couch (do they rent that out?) These two mats over wooden bed frames that had instructions on how to work out... and a tanning bed. It's safe to say that this was no great wonderful hotel. Wish I had taken a photo of the skeleton key we got.

Our cheap-ass hotel.

However, we had a door that led onto a balcony, where we could (and did) climb on the roof.