Nuremberg and Heidelberg

We picked up a rental car for the next 2.5 weeks of our trip, majority of which will be spent with Laura and Nich who are meeting us in Berlin....yay!!  Matt was oh-so-excited to drive a fancy manual shift car on Germany's spotless and beautiful autobahn (freeway).  The roads are another place where the orderliness of the German people is so evident!  What is CRAZY to me and very entertaining to Matt is the lack of a speed limit...there are sections where they will have like a 75 MPH speed limit, but much of the time, you get to go as fast as your heart desires.  All of the BMWs, Audis and Mercedes' truly FLY past you, and when you're going 80 MPH, you can only imagine how fast they are going....We stopped in the fancy town of Ingolstadt for a tasty sandwich and coffee.

View from the autobahn!

YES we are like little kids who laugh at this every time we see it!

Well, I think we sort of missed the boat on Nuremberg.  We arrived on Christmas Eve, and that is apparently the day that one of the most famous Christmas markets in Germany, which is in Nuremberg, closes. And then so does everything through December 26....haha!  We were also misled by the reviews and pictures of our apartment, because as we pulled up to the neighborhood, we were like...hmmm, this is....not...nice. And the sentiment remained as we walked into our apartment. Ooops!!  No worries, we had done some groceries prior to leaving Munich and were well stocked on food, the beautiful old town was a short walk away, and we got an invite to visit friends in Heidelberg!! We figured with any downtime, we can do some more trip planning and research.  Problem solved. 

So on Christmas Eve, we decided to finally fulfill our longtime dream lazy day and have a movie marathon, which continued on Christmas. We watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Home Alone and Love Actually, and got caught up on Breaking Bad (haha). The latter didn't fit the theme but oh well.  Our Christmas dinner consisted of our homemade salad and vegetable and bean soup, with German cookies and wine!  We also exchanged ornaments that we picked out for each other at a Christmas market in Munich.  To top it off, we Skyped with family, and it was so nice to see everyone's faces. We ventured out to walk around the famous Old town of Nuremberg. Nothing was open, but the buildings were all so beautiful.  I will admit I was a bit turned off by how commercialized the area is, despite the loads of history it contains (famous Nuremberg trials, for example).  It was a low-key and lovely day.  

View of street in old town Nuremberg

Church in Nuremberg

Part 1 of our Christmas dinner! 

To be honest, the highlight of these few days was actually venturing OUT of Nuremberg.  There's something so special about meeting up with friends in a foreign country, and meeting up with people you hardly know is so much less daunting than it would be at home. For example,  we met with a friend of a friend in Mannheim for a lovely lunch....never met him before in person but chatted online a bit and heard lots of wonderful things from our mutual friend, so why not?!  This was just outside of Heidelberg, a BEAUTIFUL city, where we stayed with a wonderful family and met more friends!  All of our new German friends were previous exchange students of our friends back home.  So cool!  They let us stay at their amazing home cooked us such a delicious meal.  We rode our bikes into town to explore it's beauty, and rode back in a crazy downpour of rain after having a traditional German meal at Palmbraue Gasse.  What a wonderful experience!! And tomorrow, we are off to Berlin, where we will meet my besties!

View of Heidelberg Castle from city

Inside of an old church in Heidelberg

View of Heidelberg from castle

Our friends in Heidelberg!!!