Sunday 1st May 2005 - Visiting Nürnberg with Phan and Phuong
Sunday morning came around and luckily there were no headaches to report. Phan and Phuong had read all about the Nazi Party headquarters in Nürnberg and were keen for a visit, so it was off to the train station and into Nürnberg.
Among his other traits, Hitler was quite a theatrical chap who sure liked to put on a show. His plans for the party headquarters in Nürnberg were grand indeed, although only a relatively small percentage of the overall structures were ever built. No doubt this had something to do with him losing the war, and dying unceremoniously well ahead of time.
Nevertheless, the parts that were actually built are well worth a visit. The main headquarter building is now a museum which is very informative. All the information signs are in German, but each one has a number on it and they give each visitor a little speaker machine programmed to your language. You just type in the number of the sign, put the hand piece to your ear, and the machine tells you what the sign says in a language you can understand. Very clever.
Here's Bradley in front of an aerial photograph of the main headquarter building that is now the museum.
Here's what it looks like standing inside the horseshoe area.
And here we are standing at the place where we took the above panorama.
This is a picture which was on the wall showing one of the big speaking halls. You can just imagine it filled with people and Hitler's voice booming from the loud speakers.
The headquarters is beside a really lovely lake where people were rowing and paddling around in the sunshine.
On the other side of the lake there was an amazing beer garden, which was like a dozen smaller beer gardens all made into one. There were tables, chairs, sofas with big cushions, deck chairs, sun umbrellas, shady trees, loads of individual bars, different food huts in all different styles (Asian, Italian, German, etc...); it was great. And it was LOADED with people! You could hire roller blades, bicycles, paddleboats for the lake, shisha pipes; just about anything. For me it was like stepping into Thailand. Most of the fences and huts were made of bamboo in the South East Asian style. Unfortunately all the sofas and deck chairs were taken when we arrived, so we got to sit in an out of the way corner, but it was still lovely.
I tried to get the others to pose for a cool photograph in front of the church. I lay down on the ground to get an interesting angle for the shot, but they just started throwing coins at me and laughing! Pricks wrecked my shot!
But that's ok, because Bradley took a crap shot too! Here he is trying to take a cool picture of the church. All he got was a picture of the inside of his camera pouch and his nasal passages.
In the end I managed to get them to pose for a reasonable photo, although Phan looks like he's posing for a rock star music video.
We found another cool pointy thing on our walk. Bradley finally got his camera upside down stunt to work for this one (ie. no camera pouch or nasal hairs this time).
