I forgot to mention two key points in my last email. One was the sensation, as I looked at Heidelberg's old bridge, that I was taking the trip that I had planned for so long. While a seemingly mundane fact, this feeling impacted me powerfully, and it had not yet hit me until I got to Heidelberg. It is fascinating to be seeing the places at which I had looked only in pictures; the reality and concreteness of the trip can be astounding, even if the bare fact of my being here is self-evident.
The second point of note that I did not mention was that of the railways' economically working. How is it that there can be multiple trains per day between, say, Stuttgart and Nuremberg, when it would seem that so few people need to make that trip? Part of the rationality of having trains run so frequently lies in people's not actually going, on the whole, all of the way from one city to another: many more people need to take the train from, say, Stuggart to some city in between Stuttgart and Nuremberg, or from some in-between city to another city closer to Nuremberg, than need to go all of the way. Nonetheless, the number of trains that run from place to place in Germany is flabbergasting. Perhaps the reason for their being so expensive is that fewer people need to take them than ideally would do. Whatever the case, I hope that systems of transport like this one (as well as international flights) remain popular for the next few years so that I can finish all of my travels without difficulty. What happens to trains and planes after 2017 is not my affair.
I started the day out by sleeping through my alarm and missing the train that I wanted to take to Nuremberg. While I am accustomed to waking up an hour or so before I actually have to get out of bed and going back to sleep for awhile, today I woke up over an hour later than I should have, and I still felt groggy. It is possible that a sleep deficit from weeks of travel was catching up with me, while it is also possible that I was drugged by all of the antihistamines that I had started taking. I have had incredibly bad allergies since around the time of my arrival in Frankfurt, and they have been getting worse with every passing day. As a result, I have increased the dosage of antihistamines that I am taking, and it might take a few days for me to adjust to them.
I discovered, when I arrived at Stuttgart's train station with the intention of leaving the city, that it was even worse than Cologne's. Its set-up was just as illogical as Cologne's it only had two overhead screens showing departure and arrival times, while most big train stations have a dozen or more; there was nowhere at all to sit down while one waited for one's train; there was neither a information desk for taking trains, nor an office for buying tickets (One had perforce to use the machines. I like to at least have the option of talking to a person.); and almost all of the trains that were leaving Stuttgart were delayed.
The second point of note that I did not mention was that of the railways' economically working. How is it that there can be multiple trains per day between, say, Stuttgart and Nuremberg, when it would seem that so few people need to make that trip? Part of the rationality of having trains run so frequently lies in people's not actually going, on the whole, all of the way from one city to another: many more people need to take the train from, say, Stuggart to some city in between Stuttgart and Nuremberg, or from some in-between city to another city closer to Nuremberg, than need to go all of the way. Nonetheless, the number of trains that run from place to place in Germany is flabbergasting. Perhaps the reason for their being so expensive is that fewer people need to take them than ideally would do. Whatever the case, I hope that systems of transport like this one (as well as international flights) remain popular for the next few years so that I can finish all of my travels without difficulty. What happens to trains and planes after 2017 is not my affair.
I started the day out by sleeping through my alarm and missing the train that I wanted to take to Nuremberg. While I am accustomed to waking up an hour or so before I actually have to get out of bed and going back to sleep for awhile, today I woke up over an hour later than I should have, and I still felt groggy. It is possible that a sleep deficit from weeks of travel was catching up with me, while it is also possible that I was drugged by all of the antihistamines that I had started taking. I have had incredibly bad allergies since around the time of my arrival in Frankfurt, and they have been getting worse with every passing day. As a result, I have increased the dosage of antihistamines that I am taking, and it might take a few days for me to adjust to them.
I discovered, when I arrived at Stuttgart's train station with the intention of leaving the city, that it was even worse than Cologne's. Its set-up was just as illogical as Cologne's it only had two overhead screens showing departure and arrival times, while most big train stations have a dozen or more; there was nowhere at all to sit down while one waited for one's train; there was neither a information desk for taking trains, nor an office for buying tickets (One had perforce to use the machines. I like to at least have the option of talking to a person.); and almost all of the trains that were leaving Stuttgart were delayed.
The train ride itself was enjoyable. The landscape got nicer and nicer as we distanced ourselves from Stuttgart. There were apple trees and vineyards close to it and, father away, the same dense copses as there were south of Heidelberg. The sylvan hills of parts of Bavaria and the Rhineland look so nice that it is a wonder that Johann Goethe described not them, but Weimar, in The Sorrows of Young Werther. [Edit: Goethe grew up in Frankfurt, and I had the names of parts of Germany confused. Southern Germany consists of two states, Baden-Wurttemberg and Bavaria, and it was probably about the previous of those two that Goethe was writing, which explains the uncanny similarity between his writings and what one sees through the train window while travelling in south-eastern Germany.] We passed through many Lilliputian towns on the way to Nuremberg and even stopped, at times, in seemingly uninhabited areas. The train would sit in total silence at such stops, the air laden with the weight of the summer heat, for a few minutes before continuing onwards. The pale-blue sky was sprinkled with clumps and shreds of cloud, and a slight breeze, barely enough to stir the hair on the heads of people who had hair, blew in through the open window. The air was stiflingly hot, and sunlight poured in through the window. I felt as though I had been thrust into an entirely different world from the modernity and comfort of a place like Dusseldorf.
Nuremberg's train station impressed me. It was immaculately clean and air-conditioned; it was a smoke-free environment; and, unlike the train stations of Stuttgart or Cologne, it had its information desk and ticket office in entirely natural places. I had a bit of a misadventure before setting off for my hostel: instead of walking straight through the door in the direction in which I was more or less sure to find the old city, I asked the woman at the information desk a couple of questions. The first was something banal about trains that I do not remember, and the second was where the information desk was. When I saw, based on a Google map, that my hostel was near to a well-known city square, I asked where that was, which is when the conversation went downhill. (I had said that I was looking for the youth hostel in which I had booked a room.) While the woman pointed in the direction of the hostel and told me how to get there, she would not let me leave once I had thanked her. Instead, she started asking a series of questions that I could not understand and giving me all sorts of unnecessary information. She even took it upon herself to look up some hotel or other and give me its phone number and address, which I promptly threw out as soon as I left the station. I understand that she was merely trying to help, but it is exasperating when people try to have complex conversations with me despite my limited knowledge of the German language. When I say that my German is getting better, what I really mean is that it is getting better in the context of ordering food and taking trains. Conversations about those two things, especially the second, I can lead with enough fluency to get what I want. Anything else is more or less beyond my means, though I can make simple statements about myself and ask things like, "Is he drunk?" when a man starts yelling outside of a train station.
Nuremberg's train station impressed me. It was immaculately clean and air-conditioned; it was a smoke-free environment; and, unlike the train stations of Stuttgart or Cologne, it had its information desk and ticket office in entirely natural places. I had a bit of a misadventure before setting off for my hostel: instead of walking straight through the door in the direction in which I was more or less sure to find the old city, I asked the woman at the information desk a couple of questions. The first was something banal about trains that I do not remember, and the second was where the information desk was. When I saw, based on a Google map, that my hostel was near to a well-known city square, I asked where that was, which is when the conversation went downhill. (I had said that I was looking for the youth hostel in which I had booked a room.) While the woman pointed in the direction of the hostel and told me how to get there, she would not let me leave once I had thanked her. Instead, she started asking a series of questions that I could not understand and giving me all sorts of unnecessary information. She even took it upon herself to look up some hotel or other and give me its phone number and address, which I promptly threw out as soon as I left the station. I understand that she was merely trying to help, but it is exasperating when people try to have complex conversations with me despite my limited knowledge of the German language. When I say that my German is getting better, what I really mean is that it is getting better in the context of ordering food and taking trains. Conversations about those two things, especially the second, I can lead with enough fluency to get what I want. Anything else is more or less beyond my means, though I can make simple statements about myself and ask things like, "Is he drunk?" when a man starts yelling outside of a train station.
While I may be kicking a dead horse, I should point out the reason for my frustration: I can barely speak German; people should not lead me into a pointless question-and-answer game when they have already told me what I need to know. I am not likely to approach people with sophisticated questions; I tend to ask questions with easy "yes" or "no" answers. If a tourist who hardly spoke a word of English came up to me in Vancouver and asked where Stanley Park was, I would not recite Walt Whitman poems to him, and it infuriates me when people in Germany pull a similar tact with me.
That being said, I fell in love with Nuremberg as soon as I left the train station. While it, like Stuttgart, has no functional sidewalk for getting across the road in front of the train station, it also does not have any semblance of such a sidewalk, unlike Stuttgart; hence, one does not get confused and attempt to cross the road above ground. Once one has crossed the main road outside of the train station, one is almost immediately in a pedestrian-only zone. While the streets of Nuremberg were, like those of all other German (but not French) cities, not designed with any mind for logic or ease of passage, the city center is small enough that, once lost, one can reorient oneself and continue exploring without especial difficulty. Nuremberg's city center is filled with churches, museums, buildings of historical import, statues, fountains, cafes, shops, and hotels - all of the trappings of a historic German town. I am not sure what makes it stand out so much as a city of refinement, culture, and accessibility, but its near-absence of cars in the city center, the concentration of its historical attractions, and its easy fusion of old and new, such as I encountered in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf (but to greater effect in Nuremberg, as its history is much richer), must have contributed to its overarching atmosphere.
One thing that stands out about Nuremberg is its opulence. One of the churches that I visited in it had finely-fluted pillars leading up to the ceiling and statues stuck to every bit of open space, like a person's body covered in tattoos, while another, which had a rounded dome and mostly-circular nave, had supporting columns made of marble. Despite there being plenty of modern restaurants and stores in the city's center, it feels as though all the buildings there were made by architects working in one specific period; the city center has a sense of cohesiveness to it. Nuremberg is also filled with reminders, often in the form of placards on the sides of buildings or inscriptions on statues, of what it once was, making one feel, so to speak, as though one were standing today on the shoulders of giants. It is funny that Nuremberg and Stuttgart contrast so starkly: the former is astonishingly beautiful, while the latter is so horrifically ugly that it makes one want to vomit. If one took the average of the two cities, one would have a fairly standard large German city.
The final thing that I have to say before I move on to other maters - for I still have a lot to say, unfortunately - is that the city center and the area just outside of the city center are curiously antipodal. When I stepped away from the city center to look at one of the towers belonging to the city's old wall (much of which is still intact - or, rather, was reconstructed after being bombed in World War II), I found myself on streets that were almost dead silent. I could hear the birds chirping (they were, as usual, impressive, and they were different from the ones in Heidelberg), for there was no more human noise, and there was almost no traffic. I passed ordinary apartments in which people lived and became the only person walking around with a camera in his hand. It was both curious and enheartening that the contrast between the historic and the more modern parts of town was so strict: while Nuremberg did not feel quite as lively outside of the city center as Strasbourg, the separation between the old and the new - the lack of spillover from the old onto the new - indicated to me that it was a growing, living city.
I called my having more things to say unfortunate because I want to go to bed, but I have a few more points to cover. Firstly, Nurember has exiguous sidewalks for a city that is so pedestrian-friendly - there are so few cars that it is easy to jaywalk. Secondly, I bought strawberries in an open market in the city center for the first and last time on this trip. It is interesting how a tourist is ripped off by fruit vendors. I first approached a fruit stall because it is hard to get enough fresh fruit while travelling, and I figured that the fruit being sold in the market would be good, as there were lots of other people trying to buy it. As soon as I approached a stall and it was clear that I did not speak much German, the vendor switched into reasonably-fluent English, a bad sign. He gave me a strawberry to try, which made and quickly walked behind the cash register, asking if I wanted a box of strawberries. When I discovered the price, I sounded skeptical and was ready to turn me down, so he offered me a half-box, which was only one Euro cheaper, and yet I bought it.
There are a bunch of issues at play here. Firstly, the tourist, upon being assailed by the vendor, is confused and does not know what to do. He wants the fruit, or else he would not be there in the first place, and, having been offered a strawberry to try, he feels almost indebted to vendor. My own thinking was that the box of strawberries was only two dollars more expensive than a three-scoop ice cream cone (at a reasonable rate - sometimes, they are closer to $3.50, or $1.5 less than the box of strawberries) and that I could not get a significantly better deal at a grocery store, which may have been true. The strawberries lower in the box turned out to be worse than the ones higher in it, which was no surprise. The curious thing about the whole transaction was that, if the strawberries had only cost 3 Euros and had been uniformly good, I would have gone back each day to buy them (I have found the apricots and strawberries here better than the ones back home, though I have not tried too many other fruits.), meaning that I would have spent 12 Euros on them. By ripping me off, the fruit vendor only got $5 out of me, which might be a good deal for him regardless, as another stupid tourist will replace me tomorrow. I knew, as I approached the vendor, that I was in danger of being ripped off, but his clever lassoing of me led me to go through with a purchase that I should not have made.
Nuremberg is a town of which one could write endlessly. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I will have to end my narrative here and move on to more global issues. The thought that has sat with me the most for the past while is that history is taught incompetently in schools. The point of history should be to tell us more about the present and future through the lens of the past: it should help us to understand how we got where we are and where we might end up next (as a society, civilization, &c.). Unfortunately, it is taught in such a perfunctory way that students of it (at least, at the high school level, at which it would be trivial to teach it more proficiently) come away knowing a collection of more or less isolated facts, such as that Napoleon Bonaparte was coronated in the year 1805. This fact has no use to me, as it is not connected in my mind with any other real fact except that wars of conquest were still popular at the start of the 19th century. If history were taught more systematically and with more of an aim to generate critical thinking, it would be of much more use to students learning it. The only reason for my knowing that people still tried to cure themselves of illnesses as recently as the mid-19th century with herb-based witches' brews is that I have read some of Gustave Flaubert's fiction. While fiction writers can give us insight into history, it is preposterous that they should teach us more about it than books of history themselves. When was modern plumbing invented? What were reservoirs like in the 1800s (or 1300s, or 500s, &c.)? When did English tort law come into widespread use? Questions like those - at least, to my mind - are key to our understanding how our present society came to be and how people lived before us. If lessons in history were grouped by theme, for example (the history of law, the history of science, the history of medicine, the history of warfare, the history of diplomacy, the history of human rights, &c.), then students would almost surely come away knowing more about it than they do at present.
That being said, I think that one large omission in the current pedagogy of history is the history of atrocities against mankind. While that sounds like a morose course of study, I consider it gravely important, as we rarely see beyond World Wars I and II when we think about terrible things that have happened on a mass scale in the past century. What, then, of the massacre of the Armenians in 1912, the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, Stalin's purging of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the Great Leap Forward, the Vietnam War, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Hungarian, Czech, and Polish revolutions, the massacres in India (in Pondicherry?) and Tianamen Square, and other atrocities that I have never even heard of? Many students of history will have heard of those things, but they will only know of them in passing and will not know their magnitude or causes. While the Holocaust was one of the most morally-repugnant acts - perhaps the very most - of the 20th century, it was not alone, and our preponderant focus on it as the greatest wrong of the 20th century may blind us to the existence of other misdeeds that were nearly as terrible. I would like to imagine that the horrors of the Holocaust taught humanity to never again do such a thing, but, based on our history, we have not learned a thing at all. If history were taught more effectively in schools, we might at least be aware of the possibility of such wrongdoings, rather than stumbling into them unawares.
It is now past 11:00 PM, and I should go to bed. I wish that I had time to keep writing! My visit to Nuremberg has so far proven pleasurable and thought-provoking. I hope to get the chance to see the sites of the 1930s Nazi Rallies and the subsequent Nuremberg trials, as they might further impact my thinking about the Holocaust. Looking at Germany today, I find it shocking - as many other people must have - that such a thing could have happened at all, though the signs of its build-up were clear in retrospect. Perhaps Germans in the 1930s reacted to the growing anti-Semitism - and this example just jumped to mind; I do not mean for it to trivialize the Holocaust - almost as I thought about buying those strawberries today. This might be a bad idea, I thought; this seems like it is certainly a bad idea. Now I am being offered something at a very unreasonable price. I should back at. The vendor wants me to buy his wares, though; he expects that of me. Screw it. I can save the money on other purchases later. These should at least be decent.
In many areas of live (e.g., weight gain), we allow inertia to rule our behaviors, because fighting inertia takes hard work. For an entire nation to be overtaken by inertia sounds almost fantastical, but one can see that happening in the USA, where people continue to shoot each other dead and raise obese children because it is convenient to do so (I do not mean to pick on the States; that example was easy and on hand.). I do not really have anywhere else to go with this thought. I am planning to visit Bamberg tomorrow, Nordlingen and Rothenburb ab der Tauber on the 15th, Wurzurg after that, Dinkelbuhl and Augsburg after that, and then Ulm and Friedrichshaffen. I am looking forward to leaving Nuremberg, in a sense, as this is the worst hostel at which I have stayed so far.
That being said, I fell in love with Nuremberg as soon as I left the train station. While it, like Stuttgart, has no functional sidewalk for getting across the road in front of the train station, it also does not have any semblance of such a sidewalk, unlike Stuttgart; hence, one does not get confused and attempt to cross the road above ground. Once one has crossed the main road outside of the train station, one is almost immediately in a pedestrian-only zone. While the streets of Nuremberg were, like those of all other German (but not French) cities, not designed with any mind for logic or ease of passage, the city center is small enough that, once lost, one can reorient oneself and continue exploring without especial difficulty. Nuremberg's city center is filled with churches, museums, buildings of historical import, statues, fountains, cafes, shops, and hotels - all of the trappings of a historic German town. I am not sure what makes it stand out so much as a city of refinement, culture, and accessibility, but its near-absence of cars in the city center, the concentration of its historical attractions, and its easy fusion of old and new, such as I encountered in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf (but to greater effect in Nuremberg, as its history is much richer), must have contributed to its overarching atmosphere.
One thing that stands out about Nuremberg is its opulence. One of the churches that I visited in it had finely-fluted pillars leading up to the ceiling and statues stuck to every bit of open space, like a person's body covered in tattoos, while another, which had a rounded dome and mostly-circular nave, had supporting columns made of marble. Despite there being plenty of modern restaurants and stores in the city's center, it feels as though all the buildings there were made by architects working in one specific period; the city center has a sense of cohesiveness to it. Nuremberg is also filled with reminders, often in the form of placards on the sides of buildings or inscriptions on statues, of what it once was, making one feel, so to speak, as though one were standing today on the shoulders of giants. It is funny that Nuremberg and Stuttgart contrast so starkly: the former is astonishingly beautiful, while the latter is so horrifically ugly that it makes one want to vomit. If one took the average of the two cities, one would have a fairly standard large German city.
The final thing that I have to say before I move on to other maters - for I still have a lot to say, unfortunately - is that the city center and the area just outside of the city center are curiously antipodal. When I stepped away from the city center to look at one of the towers belonging to the city's old wall (much of which is still intact - or, rather, was reconstructed after being bombed in World War II), I found myself on streets that were almost dead silent. I could hear the birds chirping (they were, as usual, impressive, and they were different from the ones in Heidelberg), for there was no more human noise, and there was almost no traffic. I passed ordinary apartments in which people lived and became the only person walking around with a camera in his hand. It was both curious and enheartening that the contrast between the historic and the more modern parts of town was so strict: while Nuremberg did not feel quite as lively outside of the city center as Strasbourg, the separation between the old and the new - the lack of spillover from the old onto the new - indicated to me that it was a growing, living city.
I called my having more things to say unfortunate because I want to go to bed, but I have a few more points to cover. Firstly, Nurember has exiguous sidewalks for a city that is so pedestrian-friendly - there are so few cars that it is easy to jaywalk. Secondly, I bought strawberries in an open market in the city center for the first and last time on this trip. It is interesting how a tourist is ripped off by fruit vendors. I first approached a fruit stall because it is hard to get enough fresh fruit while travelling, and I figured that the fruit being sold in the market would be good, as there were lots of other people trying to buy it. As soon as I approached a stall and it was clear that I did not speak much German, the vendor switched into reasonably-fluent English, a bad sign. He gave me a strawberry to try, which made and quickly walked behind the cash register, asking if I wanted a box of strawberries. When I discovered the price, I sounded skeptical and was ready to turn me down, so he offered me a half-box, which was only one Euro cheaper, and yet I bought it.
There are a bunch of issues at play here. Firstly, the tourist, upon being assailed by the vendor, is confused and does not know what to do. He wants the fruit, or else he would not be there in the first place, and, having been offered a strawberry to try, he feels almost indebted to vendor. My own thinking was that the box of strawberries was only two dollars more expensive than a three-scoop ice cream cone (at a reasonable rate - sometimes, they are closer to $3.50, or $1.5 less than the box of strawberries) and that I could not get a significantly better deal at a grocery store, which may have been true. The strawberries lower in the box turned out to be worse than the ones higher in it, which was no surprise. The curious thing about the whole transaction was that, if the strawberries had only cost 3 Euros and had been uniformly good, I would have gone back each day to buy them (I have found the apricots and strawberries here better than the ones back home, though I have not tried too many other fruits.), meaning that I would have spent 12 Euros on them. By ripping me off, the fruit vendor only got $5 out of me, which might be a good deal for him regardless, as another stupid tourist will replace me tomorrow. I knew, as I approached the vendor, that I was in danger of being ripped off, but his clever lassoing of me led me to go through with a purchase that I should not have made.
Nuremberg is a town of which one could write endlessly. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I will have to end my narrative here and move on to more global issues. The thought that has sat with me the most for the past while is that history is taught incompetently in schools. The point of history should be to tell us more about the present and future through the lens of the past: it should help us to understand how we got where we are and where we might end up next (as a society, civilization, &c.). Unfortunately, it is taught in such a perfunctory way that students of it (at least, at the high school level, at which it would be trivial to teach it more proficiently) come away knowing a collection of more or less isolated facts, such as that Napoleon Bonaparte was coronated in the year 1805. This fact has no use to me, as it is not connected in my mind with any other real fact except that wars of conquest were still popular at the start of the 19th century. If history were taught more systematically and with more of an aim to generate critical thinking, it would be of much more use to students learning it. The only reason for my knowing that people still tried to cure themselves of illnesses as recently as the mid-19th century with herb-based witches' brews is that I have read some of Gustave Flaubert's fiction. While fiction writers can give us insight into history, it is preposterous that they should teach us more about it than books of history themselves. When was modern plumbing invented? What were reservoirs like in the 1800s (or 1300s, or 500s, &c.)? When did English tort law come into widespread use? Questions like those - at least, to my mind - are key to our understanding how our present society came to be and how people lived before us. If lessons in history were grouped by theme, for example (the history of law, the history of science, the history of medicine, the history of warfare, the history of diplomacy, the history of human rights, &c.), then students would almost surely come away knowing more about it than they do at present.
That being said, I think that one large omission in the current pedagogy of history is the history of atrocities against mankind. While that sounds like a morose course of study, I consider it gravely important, as we rarely see beyond World Wars I and II when we think about terrible things that have happened on a mass scale in the past century. What, then, of the massacre of the Armenians in 1912, the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, Stalin's purging of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the Great Leap Forward, the Vietnam War, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Hungarian, Czech, and Polish revolutions, the massacres in India (in Pondicherry?) and Tianamen Square, and other atrocities that I have never even heard of? Many students of history will have heard of those things, but they will only know of them in passing and will not know their magnitude or causes. While the Holocaust was one of the most morally-repugnant acts - perhaps the very most - of the 20th century, it was not alone, and our preponderant focus on it as the greatest wrong of the 20th century may blind us to the existence of other misdeeds that were nearly as terrible. I would like to imagine that the horrors of the Holocaust taught humanity to never again do such a thing, but, based on our history, we have not learned a thing at all. If history were taught more effectively in schools, we might at least be aware of the possibility of such wrongdoings, rather than stumbling into them unawares.
It is now past 11:00 PM, and I should go to bed. I wish that I had time to keep writing! My visit to Nuremberg has so far proven pleasurable and thought-provoking. I hope to get the chance to see the sites of the 1930s Nazi Rallies and the subsequent Nuremberg trials, as they might further impact my thinking about the Holocaust. Looking at Germany today, I find it shocking - as many other people must have - that such a thing could have happened at all, though the signs of its build-up were clear in retrospect. Perhaps Germans in the 1930s reacted to the growing anti-Semitism - and this example just jumped to mind; I do not mean for it to trivialize the Holocaust - almost as I thought about buying those strawberries today. This might be a bad idea, I thought; this seems like it is certainly a bad idea. Now I am being offered something at a very unreasonable price. I should back at. The vendor wants me to buy his wares, though; he expects that of me. Screw it. I can save the money on other purchases later. These should at least be decent.
In many areas of live (e.g., weight gain), we allow inertia to rule our behaviors, because fighting inertia takes hard work. For an entire nation to be overtaken by inertia sounds almost fantastical, but one can see that happening in the USA, where people continue to shoot each other dead and raise obese children because it is convenient to do so (I do not mean to pick on the States; that example was easy and on hand.). I do not really have anywhere else to go with this thought. I am planning to visit Bamberg tomorrow, Nordlingen and Rothenburb ab der Tauber on the 15th, Wurzurg after that, Dinkelbuhl and Augsburg after that, and then Ulm and Friedrichshaffen. I am looking forward to leaving Nuremberg, in a sense, as this is the worst hostel at which I have stayed so far.
This shows part of Nuremberg's old town.
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