Trains and Hostels - Nuremberg, Sep. 21

I've arrived in Nuremburg! I've written about today's adventures below, but realized I forgot to mention a couple things in the previous post. So I'm including those here before the main story for today.

I experienced my first Sunday in Germany a couple days ago. What's special about that? Well, it's what Germans call the Ruhetag, or literally "rest day." Almost all stores are closed, only a few places selling food stay open. But even those have reduced hours, so you'd better make sure you have what you need if you're cooking! Also, the public transit was running at reduced capacity, so trams and busses came less frequently to each stop. Better not miss the one you need!

Most of the streets around the center of Leipzig had been closed off. They usually have medium density traffic in them, but on Sunday the roads were completely devoid of cars. People had set up various activities on the roads, such as this place for kids to practice riding bikes.

There were still plenty of people in the center of the city, but definitely a lot fewer than normal. It wasn't eerily quiet or anything, but it was very obviously a more quiet day than normal. Germans do really seem to value their days off!

Unrelated, but I've also noticed a road sign here that I've not seen in the US. It's a yellow and white diamond, which indicates to drivers that their road has priority over intersecting roads. All the intersecting roads will have yield signs (standard red and white upside-down triangle), so there's no confusion about who has right of way. This is a lot like 2-way stop signs in the US, except drivers giving right of way aren't required to come to a full stop if they don't need to (which no one does anyways, so this makes fewer criminals).

In my researching, I found this website that gives a really thorough explanation of who has right of way in various situations. I definitely learned a couple useful things from it! Anyways, that's all I wanted to cover before the main part of the blog post, on with the story!

Sleep last night was pretty awful. The person who snores really loudly stayed for another night, and guess what, they snored. I woke up to it around 4am, then popped my headphones on. Again, they're pretty effective at getting rid of noise, but they're really uncomfortable for me to sleep with. This person snored all the way until 9am or so, meaning I couldn't take them off at any point (I much prefer being uncomfortable over listening to snoring). I think I only managed to sleep for 2 hours or so in that 5 hour window, that was probably one of the worst nights of this trip.

I was originally intending to sleep in for a while longer, but I was actually getting angry about how little sleep I'd gotten. So just after 9am, I packed up my stuff quickly and checked out, then got to the train station around 10am. My train left just before noon, so I had a couple hours to kill. I got a couple small food items (more practice ordering in German!) and just listened to music until the train came.

All of my previous train journeys have been with normal regional trains, but this journey was on a fast ICE train! The displays showed a map of where the train's path, along with the current speed. We got up to 250kph, or 155mph! That may the fastest I've ever gone outside of a plane. I was also surprised by how quiet the train was, you could practically whisper to your neighbor and still be heard while travelling at full speed.

It was fun to see stuff go by at that speed. Any poles placed next to the rail line passed by incredibly fast, definitely keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times! I decided to get a picture of a pole with a really fast shutter speed (1/8000s), which gave this super neat image demonstrating the rolling shutter effect.

Obviously the pole is actually vertical, but the camera captures the pixels row-by-row. So the pixels near the top were captured slightly later than the bottom ones, at which point we'd moved a bit, causing the pole to appear to be leaning.

Even more interestingly, the shadow behind it is at a different angle! In reality, the shadow of the pole must be parallel to the pole, but the parallax effect means the shadow didn't move as far in the view of the camera. Neat!

There were also several tunnels we passed through on the way, at which point it did get quite a bit louder do to the sound getting reflected by the walls. Something I observed is that each time we entered or exited a tunnel, my ears needed to pop. That means there must have been a significant pressure change going into the tunnels, cool!

And here's a collection of scenery photos I took along the ride. This is the first time I've tried the gallery feature in a post, you can click on each image to make them bigger

Also, I saw the requests for the train route to have more labels, so I went in and put those in manually for you all. Again, there will almost certainly be some changes to this as time goes on, so this route is not definite. But it includes most of the major cities in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria (Prague will likely not be included on this trip).

Once the train arrived in Nuremberg, I made my way to the hostel. I booked a single room rather than a dorm, since I just can't handle any more of that. It may have a higher price, but it's a lot more nice! (yay rhyming) It's basically just a small hotel room, perfect for me! And it may be more expensive that a hostel dorm, but I prefer to think of it as a cheap hotel, since that's really more what it feels like.

The hostel I booked at actually didn't have great reviews, but many of the complaints were about not having good ways to meet people. I'm not actively trying to meet people on this trip, especially during a pandemic, so I don't really view that as a downside. I'm also beginning to think that people reviewing hostels are more into nightlife culture (parties, clubs, etc.), since all the highly rated places I've stayed at seem to be around the more hip nightlife areas. This place had a bit of a lower rating (8/10, compared with over 9/10 for the ones I've stayed at), and I'm actually liking it more since it's less focused on nightlife culture. So I'll probably look for hostels with slightly lower ratings, since that may actually be better for me.

Plus this hostel has laundry facilities, which I was really in need of! It wasn't cheap, 3.5 euros for the washer and 2.5 for the dryer. But I've got clean clothes finally! I also took a nice long shower now that I've got a private bathroom again, it's so nice not having other people around in the same bathroom. Having your own bathroom also means it'll be cleaner, since there's no one else to make a mess.

After getting all that sorted, I had a stroll through town. Again, the center is a big pedestrianized area with lots of shops. I really like these areas, they're so much nicer than streets full of cars everywhere. There were also lots of merchants with red and white tents selling various things, including fruits/vegetables/meats, meals, clothes, jewelry, trinkets, etc. And there was a big church that had construction crews working on it, so I assume they're working on restoring it.

That's all I've got for now. I haven't explored enough through the city to remark on it yet, so I'll save that for next time. Take care!