nuremberg

sitting here eating wasabi peanuts.. mmmm they're my new favorite snack, thanks to julien. i brought two bags home with me. i've only ever had wasabi peas, but these top them by far. probably because of all the fake additives. matt and i are finishing up a couple of german beers we brought back while watching the heat game. well, mostly him... since i'm more interested in "blogging" and "facebooking" about nuremberg. crazy me.

anyhow, we went to nuremberg in germany to visit our friend julien who i met in baltimore about 6 years ago while i  was living there. he's from france and has been living in germany for the past 3 years. he has some family in prague so we've seen him here a couple of times and decided it was our turn to go see him. we decided to use something called "rideshare" also heard of as "carshare" because we wanted to save some money. some czech lady named martina(typical woman's name here) travels to germany every weekend to visit her boyfriend. we found her on the carshare website just 3 days before we left. she was going there on a friday and heading back to prague on sunday so it worked out perfectly. we met her and another guy who was riding with us and chatted it up for the 3 hour ride over to nuremberg. it was pleasant, thankfully. :)

we got into nuremberg at 7:30pm by the train station where ju was waiting. we headed to his place. we relaxed, he made us dinner and later that nite around 10 we headed to the castle. it was so beautiful at nite. we got a great view of the little city. then we went through old town to get to a place called k4, where a dj called gold panda was going to play. it was pretty cool. we met some of julien's good friends and coworkers. had some beers and then headed home around 2am. late for this old lady. :)

on saturday julien made us a delicious brunch. we had grainy bread, fig jam from france, locally grown strawberries, capuccinos, eggs with provence herbs, turkey salami and cheese. the weather was incredible so we walked around, went to a local supermarket, then found a favorite cafe of juliens called the wanderer. we spent most of the daylight sitting out on the square people watching, drinking beer, and talking. a nice couple from america also joined us. they live upstairs in the same building as ju. then we went to posthorn, a german restaurant, for dinner. we got back to the flat and watched law abiding citzen... which was insane. i recommend it! bed time around 2am, again.

woke up this morning and repeated the same delicious brunch again. we lounged a bit, watched some planet earth on his awesome tv... definitely was weird. we haven't watched tv in so long. all we ever do is use our computers to watch shows and movies so it was a good change! then we packed up all of our things and walked around. our plan was to go see  the nazi rally grounds and then hop on the train to go meet back up with martina to go back home. the grounds were gigantic. we first looked at this huge colosseum that hitler had people build for him. it was left unfinished. then we took a 30 minute walk around a gorgeous lake to get to the rally grounds. we sat for a while and just soaked in the sun(got burnt). i guess it was really strange to think about what went on there so long ago... so much history. i took a lot of photos, most of which are on my facebook now but i will leave you with some here;

first nite between two handsome men.

nite view from the castle

some of what we ate in the mornings

 inside of the unfinished colosseum

colosseum view

where hitler stood and spoke(now run by skaters)

rally grounds

dj gold panda

schöner brunnen fountain

market in old town