The Shower

Nuremberg was an immediate hit with Ron because, just on our initial little stroll through town, we came across four Dunkin Donuts and here he is enjoying a strawberry glazed.

Nuremberg was an immediate hit with me because our hotel has a free laundry room – with the first fully-functional dryer I have ever had access to in Europe. Sure, we’ve had access to dryers before. But they’re only dryers in the sense that they have the word “dryer” appearing on them somewhere. (“Trockner” for you German speakers.) Mostly, they run for 3 or 4 hours and give your clothing back to you – still wet – and spectacularly wrinkled. So as I type this to you, my entire suitcase is full of clean clothing again – unheard of 13 days into a trip.

Another thing Nuremberg has going for it is the shower (“Dusche”) in our hotel room. Like the Trockner mentioned above, the Dusche is fully-functional, with no design flaws. A first in all of our travels. Here are some of the typical design flaws we encounter:

• Can’t figure out how to turn on water
• Can’t figure out how to turn on hot water
• There is no door so the water leaks out onto the floor
• The shower is positioned so high up that you can “fall” out trying to exit
• The shower is so small you cannot move your arms to lather up
• There is no shower head, just a spigot on a hose
• There is a shower head but it is stuck into a position that sprays water onto the floor
• The shower floor is made of some high-gloss extra slippery material, made, perhaps, to mimic the floor of a skating arena and there are no rubber tub mats in Europe. (Note: I did obtain a tub mat our Paris hotel, which had an extremely (vs. somewhat) dangerous shower floor. When I asked at the front desk, they told me they had ONE. One for a 26 room hotel – and they seemed quite confident that was adequate.)

But here is the shower at the Melter Hotel. And it’s funny, because at most hotels, I’m trying to use the shower both as a personal hygiene arena AND as a washing machine – with all my socks and assorted undergarments in there with me when I can barely move my arms outward due to size constraints. And here at the Melter, when there’s plenty of room to do laundry in the shower, there’s just no need!

All right, time to go explore Nuremberg. Here’s a couple of shots from our arrival stroll – it’s a beautiful city! It was 90% leveled by bombs by 1945, so virtually everything is a reconstruction. It apparently took until 1953 to clean up all of the rubble from the bombings.