A brief foray in to Nuremberg

The journey home from Prague was not straightforward and took something like fifteen hours. Luckily most of those hours were spent in some comfort in first class sections of modern trains but that's not how the journey started.


For a major European city, Prague seems to be remarkably unconnected to other cities by train.

Which is why the journey home started with a four hour bus ride to Nuremberg.

By way of compensation I had about an hour and a half to explore the city before catching the train to Cologne. Luckily the railway station is right on the edge of the old town and so exploration was an easy option.

The classic Northern European architecture was quite a contrast after two weeks of Baroque but it is another style that I love so that was fine.

I followed the wide pedestrian route that the useful tourist maps, conveniently placed along the way, told me would lead to the centre. And along the way there were plenty of neat buildings to admire and cafes to sit in to admire them from.


The town centre has suffered some blight from the post-war rebuilding that has made almost every English town uniformly ugly but the out-of-place stores are a small minority and the newer buildings have reverted nicely to the traditional style, colour and construction. It's all very charming.

At the centre was a wide slow river flowing East/West that bisects the old town neatly in to two parts. Here the laziness of the river encourages you to linger a while and breathe in the tranquillity and history.

Sadly the call of the train broke the peace and it was time to make the rest of the journey home via Cologne and Brussels.

During the holiday I revisited three places (Bratislava, Zilina and Prague) and stayed in three new ones (Berlin, Brno and Banska Stiavnica). All are six worth revisiting one day and Nuremberg is too. I need more holiday time :-)