On the Road Again

We're finally getting out and about and made our first daytrip a couple of Saturdays ago to Nuremburg, about an hour drive away, for a little sightseeing. Nuremburg (or Nurnberg as it's known here) has a great street (the Konigstrasse) for shopping of all sorts. The architecture is also really impressive, and it's a pretty place. Which makes the following just that more mind-boggling. Nurnberg is about an hour away from Wurzburg, which gave us just enough time to bone up on some of the history...infamous as it is. There are currently banners hanging from some of the buildings in the main square (the Lorenzplatz) displaying enlarged photos of the city in the immediate aftermath of the Allied bombing raids during WWII: January 2005 is the 60th anniversary. Almost every structure in the area was completely destroyed: cathedrals, homes, administrative buildings. According to one of the guidebooks that always seem to be floating around in the car (hey, when you live here, you need some guidebooks!) the sheer magnitude of destruction experienced in Nurnberg was second only to that of Dresden during the raids. We also visited St. Sebald's cathedral, which had more photos on display, and detailed the painstaking reconstruction of the city post-WWII. It was really beautiful inside, but cooooold: you could see your breath while standing inside the church! Brrrr! This place has nuthin' on Iowa City, IA in the winter: some of the days here have that biting cold quality to them that only humidity can give you. We dropped the car off and walked around downtown and did some actual shopping in a real live department store, which a huge relief given that M. and I have been thoroughly Ikea-ized by this point and the only other store that we've really been to is the PX, which pretty devoid of anything resembling charming retail experience...it falls into the category of "necessity shopping", or as M. and I like to remind ourselves everytime we go there, "Run in, grab what you need as quickly as possible and GET THE HECK OUT OF THERE" shopping because it's always really, really crazy in there for some reason or another. The only snag with our afternoon of shopping and sightseeing was that after wandering around the downtown area we, uh, realized that we couldn't remember where we parked M.'s car. Yes, we did park it in a parking garage, but which one? If you've ever seen that Seinfeld where Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer spend the entire episode wandering around a cement parking garage, searching and searching and searching for their car, you know what I'm talking about. We did eventually find the car: thank goodness that the SmartCars parked on either side were reeeeally short and made it a lot easier to spot! We're just excited to finally be out and about. It's just figuring out where to hit the road to next that's the hard part!