Branching Out

Having spent my first month in Coburg, it was inevitable. Coburg is a small place - I mean it only has two McDonald's, and only recently opened its first Burger King! Note I am using these places strictly as a reference to the size of the town - not as an indication of the inconvenience their relative scarcity is causing me. No, no, I can easily make do with the Wednesday buffet at the Chinese restaurant nearby (this is an odd Chinese restaurant, but that's a story for another day).

So to alleviate this situation, we have made a couple of trips outside of Coburg. The first trip was a couple of weekends ago - we took the train to neighbouring Bamberg for the evening. Mind you we were supposed to take a car, but this plan somehow fell through, and half of us ended up on the train. Why was I in this half? Because I let people walk all over me, I presume. Four of us had bought our train tickets and were waiting at the platform, when one guy, a quite Swede, decided to pull out.

Anyway, Bamberg was nice. It is about 45 mins by train, and has some nice bars and clubs. Somehow, however, we wound up freezing at the train station in the morning, because the last club shut at about 5:30, and the first train left at 6:30.

We took the Inter-City Express (ICE) train, which is very nice and fast. There are both first and second classes, but even second class was very nice, albeit a bit expensive.

The next week we took a trip to Nuremburg. This is a little further away, but much bigger, which is probably why I had heard of it. We took a car this time. I had assumed that the people we were going with knew the place, since that was the impression they had given, but in fact we had to resort to cabs to get us to where we wanted to go. Here's a tip - if you want to go to a dance venue in Germany, overcome your embarrassment about the 70s and ask to go to a Disko. Don't make the mistake that we made of asking for a night-club, or I can't be held accountable for the result.

We had a good time in the city, which seemed huge after a month in Coburg. There was one club in particular we went to which was absolutely huge - it must have had thousands of people in it. The Swedish guy, who the previous weekend had shamefully chickened out, this week had come along. Not only that, but with the addition of a moderate amount of alcohol was transformed into a crazy night-clubbing machine. Somehow he could suddenly speak fluent German and was striking up conversations with everyone we met.

We are planning a return trip this weekend, but this time during the day, so we can have a proper look around. Hopefully I will have some photos to show you when I return.