My luck has taken a turn for the worse. As you know, I had to make some rushed hostel bookings to accommodate a sudden change of plans. As it turns out, I did not get the best hostel and hotel arrangements available, but that always happens when one has little time to plan things. One of my hostels, the one in Freiburg, is almost 3 miles from the train station; while I realized this when I booked it, I did not know until today that reception there was only open from 3:00 to 7:00 PM (Another hostel in Freiburg, by comparison, is open from 9:00 AM to 1:00 AM.). I will not be able to get there before 7:00 PM, but, thankfully, the hostel manager responded to my request to stay there until 8:00 PM, and he said that he would await my arrival. (Checking in to the hotel in Nancy should be simpler.)
I started my day by sleeping in a little, but I got going so slowly that I was not able to purchase breakfast before I left Nuremberg. I had enough food to prevent my starving to death on the way to Nordlingen, and the train ride was wonderful. We passed hills covered entirely by trees, hills covered in grass, with sections of bare rock (which reminded me of Ring Mountain), and one hill that had a very fancy castle on it. There were more poppies, more giant complexes of solar panels, and even hawks here and there. I heard the second pair of people whom I have heard on this trip speaking, or attempting to speak, English and sounding like they were speaking German.
Nordlingen itself was like a low-rent Dinkelsbuhl. I was unable to leave my baggage anywhere when I got there, as I had foreseen might happen, and so I carted it with me to the center of the city. Nordlingen, like Dinkelsbuhl, is a very ancient German city with its entire city wall still intact. Beyond that, there was little to see besides cafes and bakeries. I saw my fill of the city within an hour and returned to the train station o make my trip to Augsburg.
Augsburg is the least impressive of the regal cities surrounding Nuremberg (Regensburg, Wurzburg, Bamberg, and Augsburg) that I have seen. It had fewer residences, churches, and other old buildings of note than the above-mentioned city, and its city center was spread out not in a pleasant, relaxed way, like Heidelberg's, but in more of a diluted way, so that one would pass blocks of relatively uninteresting buildings before getting to one of note. While it mostly escaped bombing by the Allied forces in World War II, Augsburg's city center is nonetheless the most modern of any of the cities surrounding it in a glitzy, commercial way - it is full of expensive stores and little else. The city does have a great many placards celebrating people who have lived in various of the residences still existing there, and it contains the very first low-rent housing district (i.e., low-rent houses in an attractive setting, rather than slums) in the world, but it has little else of interest..
I am about out of things to say, unfortunately. The weather here has been hideous, and the city center smells like warm garbage. The temperature today reached almost 90 degrees Farenheit and may get hotter tomorrow before cooling off again - it is hot enough that one feels as though one had stepped into the depths of hell. I spent the whole day sweating oceans, with sweat pouring down my forehead and temples and forming pools in my eye sockets before gushing down my cheeks. I have been perspiring so much that, when I tried to apply a second layer of sunscreen to my face, I just ended up smearing sweat all over my face. Even indoors, where it is vastly cooler, I am still coated with a sticky layer of sweat, like dried-out apple juice, from which I will only escape for five minutes when I shower, as I will just start sweating all over again in bed.
I suppose that I have complained enough. Augsburg has an incredible dearth of trees and is way too hot in the summer. I went to a local beer garden that the hostel owner recommended only to order a dish that was much smaller, as it turned out, than what I could have gotten for an equivalent amount of money, and did not even fill me up despite costing 7.80 Euros (a rarity in Germany); one always knows after the fact what to have ordered. This hostel is a million times better than the last one that I visited, making me regret that I can only spend one night here, but such is life. The hostel owner printed out maps to my next hostel and hotel for me; I am going to spend most of tomorrow on trains. At this point, I need to take a shower and get to bed. I am also going to briefly look up the climates of other countries that I was hoping to visit in future, such as Greece and Turkey, to see if I had better visit them in winter to avoid these kinds of temperatures. I wish, as always, that I had more time to write!
I started my day by sleeping in a little, but I got going so slowly that I was not able to purchase breakfast before I left Nuremberg. I had enough food to prevent my starving to death on the way to Nordlingen, and the train ride was wonderful. We passed hills covered entirely by trees, hills covered in grass, with sections of bare rock (which reminded me of Ring Mountain), and one hill that had a very fancy castle on it. There were more poppies, more giant complexes of solar panels, and even hawks here and there. I heard the second pair of people whom I have heard on this trip speaking, or attempting to speak, English and sounding like they were speaking German.
Nordlingen itself was like a low-rent Dinkelsbuhl. I was unable to leave my baggage anywhere when I got there, as I had foreseen might happen, and so I carted it with me to the center of the city. Nordlingen, like Dinkelsbuhl, is a very ancient German city with its entire city wall still intact. Beyond that, there was little to see besides cafes and bakeries. I saw my fill of the city within an hour and returned to the train station o make my trip to Augsburg.
Augsburg is the least impressive of the regal cities surrounding Nuremberg (Regensburg, Wurzburg, Bamberg, and Augsburg) that I have seen. It had fewer residences, churches, and other old buildings of note than the above-mentioned city, and its city center was spread out not in a pleasant, relaxed way, like Heidelberg's, but in more of a diluted way, so that one would pass blocks of relatively uninteresting buildings before getting to one of note. While it mostly escaped bombing by the Allied forces in World War II, Augsburg's city center is nonetheless the most modern of any of the cities surrounding it in a glitzy, commercial way - it is full of expensive stores and little else. The city does have a great many placards celebrating people who have lived in various of the residences still existing there, and it contains the very first low-rent housing district (i.e., low-rent houses in an attractive setting, rather than slums) in the world, but it has little else of interest..
I am about out of things to say, unfortunately. The weather here has been hideous, and the city center smells like warm garbage. The temperature today reached almost 90 degrees Farenheit and may get hotter tomorrow before cooling off again - it is hot enough that one feels as though one had stepped into the depths of hell. I spent the whole day sweating oceans, with sweat pouring down my forehead and temples and forming pools in my eye sockets before gushing down my cheeks. I have been perspiring so much that, when I tried to apply a second layer of sunscreen to my face, I just ended up smearing sweat all over my face. Even indoors, where it is vastly cooler, I am still coated with a sticky layer of sweat, like dried-out apple juice, from which I will only escape for five minutes when I shower, as I will just start sweating all over again in bed.
I suppose that I have complained enough. Augsburg has an incredible dearth of trees and is way too hot in the summer. I went to a local beer garden that the hostel owner recommended only to order a dish that was much smaller, as it turned out, than what I could have gotten for an equivalent amount of money, and did not even fill me up despite costing 7.80 Euros (a rarity in Germany); one always knows after the fact what to have ordered. This hostel is a million times better than the last one that I visited, making me regret that I can only spend one night here, but such is life. The hostel owner printed out maps to my next hostel and hotel for me; I am going to spend most of tomorrow on trains. At this point, I need to take a shower and get to bed. I am also going to briefly look up the climates of other countries that I was hoping to visit in future, such as Greece and Turkey, to see if I had better visit them in winter to avoid these kinds of temperatures. I wish, as always, that I had more time to write!
(Also, I do not know if the hostel to which I will soon be going will have internet access, so I may not ending up posting anything for the next few days.)
The facades of some buildings in Nordlingen.
Behold the oldest low-rent housing settlement in the world!
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