Best Campus So Far - Nuremberg / Erlangen, Sep. 23

I visited a gorgeous campus today, more information about that in the second half of this post! The surrounding town, Erlangen, is also quite nice from what I've seen, this is one of my favorite places so far. And of course I've been exploring Nuremburg too, so I've definitely got some things to share in this post!

But first, the ever topical accommodations. I'm really glad I chose a private room, it's been so nice to have my own sleep schedule again. I don't have to worry about keeping others up with my own noise, I don't get woken up by other people making noise (except people running through the hallway), and I've got my own bathroom that actually stays clean. For me, it's so much better than shared dorms, I'll definitely be booking more single rooms in the future.

I know I've talked a lot about my accommodation gripes recently, sorry if it's gotten repetitive! But now that I know what I like and dislike, I won't keep droning on about it. And for those who are curious to see it, here's a panorama of my room. It's really just a tiny hotel room with 2 beds pushed together and a small bathroom. Not as spacious as a typical hotel room, but it's plenty for me and a bit cheaper too.

I've gone through Nuremburg a few times to explore around, mainly just the center of the city with the large pedestrianized area. I know I comment about them in every other post, but they're really nice areas compared with the car filled cities in the US. Nuremburg feels pretty similar to Leipzig and Dresden, except with older buildings and more slopes. There's also a river that runs through the middle with some bridges crossing it (which is mostly what I took pictures of). I also visited the Nuremberg castle, which is built on top of a hill and has a great view of the surrounding area.

There's also a plaza area full of vendors selling things, all with their red and white striped tents. I've noticed a lot of places are selling Mediterranean and Middle Eastern foods, which I haven't noticed in the previous places I've visited. There's also a regional type of bratwurst called Nürnberger Rostbratwürste, which are usually 3 small sausages served in a bread roll with mustard. Apparently the EU has protected this name, so they're not allowed to be made anywhere other than Nuremberg. Interesting! 

I haven't experienced too much of the public transit around here, but it seems to be a mix of bus, tram, and U-Bahn. I don't know what's the most popular, but I've seen lots of busses an only 1 tram (and I haven't gone underground at all).

Also, the bike infrastructure here looks pretty good. There's lots of bike lanes on the sidewalks, usually indicated with red or some dark gray. These work really well, since people tend to stay off them unless there's a crowded area, at which point the cyclists just slow down to get through safely. Here's an example from an intersection near where I'm staying, it's really easy to tell where bikes are meant to go (as well as cars and public transit). This does a great job of separating each mode of transit, no one is held up by any other mode of transit (for example, cars getting stuck behind slower cyclists, or public transit getting held up by car traffic).

The bike infrastructure isn't perfect though. There are plenty of places that either don't accommodate cyclists well, or even at all. Here's another example nearby, where cyclists have to ride in a painted bicycle gutter next to cars moving faster than them. Why not put the bike lane on the other side of the parked cars? Physical separation from moving traffic is much better when it can be done. Plus then you wouldn't have to worry about a parked car suddenly pulling out in front of you. Also, there's only a bike lane going west on this road, where do you ride when heading east?

Another interesting trick I've seen is this type of road in the next picture, where there are bike lanes going in both directions, and a single car lane in the middle. Cars can still drive in both directions, but they're not constrained to stay in a lane like a normal road. If two cars come across each other with no cyclists around, they just move into the bike lanes to avoid each other. If bikes are around, then I'm guessing the cars just slow down to wait for the best time to pass by (haven't actually seen that happen). I think these roads are interesting and fine for low density traffic, but probably become dangerous with medium and high density traffic.

Ok, enough about bikes, let's talk about Erlangen! The reason I visited is because there's a university here called Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, usually written as FAU. It's split into multiple campuses, which is still a bit of a confusing point for me. But I believe there's 1 (2?) in Erlangen and 1 in Nuremberg. The PhD I'm thinking of doing is based on lasers, and the Erlangen campus is home to their optics programs.

Erlangen is about 20km north of Nuremberg, so I took a train over. I had searched for FAU on Google Maps, which brought me to a building near the train station with a really nice park behind it with this large fountain.

But all the buildings I could see around were just shops, not school buildings. This is where I started getting really confused about where the actual campus is (hadn't yet realized it was split), and did some frantic Google searches. I discovered the main campus is actually in the south corner of Erlangen, so I'm really not sure what this area was. That's also why I think there's 2 campuses in Erlangen, even though Wikipedia says there's only 1. Oh well, I took a bus to the main campus area, since that was a few km away.

I hadn't realized this at the time, but there's 2 main areas of the campus. From what I've gathered, the physics and chemistry departments are on the north side in more of a forested area, and the engineering departments are on the south side. That may not be a complete explanation, but that's what I'd figured out when I was there. There's also a suburban housing area west of the campus, the east and south sides are forested.

I only explored the north half since I wanted to see the physics buildings. In hindsight I really should have explored through the south side too, but it's a bit late for that unfortunately. Regardless, I really enjoyed walking through that part of campus! Pretty much all the areas between the buildings are forested, so it was a really pleasant area to walk through! Many of the paths between buildings are gravel rather than being paved over, so it really felt more like walking on a trail than going between university buildings. I really enjoyed this!

I've never seen a place quite like this before, it very much feels like buildings have just been placed in the middle of a forest, rather than the area being built from the ground up. And it was incredibly quiet too, all the foliage does a decent job of absorbing sound waves. Even though there was a decent amount of construction happening to the physics buildings, I could barely hear it.

I even passed by a machine shop with lots of fun tools, including lathes, bandsaws, milling machines, drill presses, etc. I do a lot of projects that require tools like these, so this got me excited. Someone left the door open, so I nabbed a picture (it came out a bit blurry, whoops!).

A lot of the buildings in this area seemed older, but there were some newer ones too. For example, the northernmost building on campus has a much more modern design to it. This is the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, which I imagine is where some laser labs are located. If I were to do a PhD here, there's a good chance I'd work in this building.

That's the extent of what I explored at FAU. This is the first campus I've visited in Germany that actually got me excited, I really enjoyed exploring around it! This one is definitely at the top of the list for now in terms of physical campuses. I don't know a lot about this school's research reputation, but I'll definitely be looking into it now. From my preliminary searching, it sounds like a good institute, the tricky part is finding an advisor for my project.​ But I'll have to save that for later.

That's all I've got for now, I do quite like Erlangen from what I've seen (which isn't a lot, admittedly). I'm glad I visited here, but I can't stay any longer, I'm off to Munich tomorrow! That's apparently where all the German stereotypes come from, we'll see how much I actually come across. Take care!