Maximizing our touring in Nuremberg while Ron makes friends with various robots

I had a long list of sites planned for Nuremberg and had purchased a city touring card called the Nuremberg Card which, for 48 hours, lets us walk into pretty much any museum or site in the city. I like these cards – they create a reckless tourist mentality in me – and I will drag us into pretty much any site we walk by. Notice in the picture above that I am back in my Munich Emergency Bad Weather Hat – the weather has been so cold on this trip – at least 15 degrees colder than we were expecting.

We started our day at Nuremberg Castle. I won’t repeat this for each site, but keep in mind that virtually everything in Nuremberg was rebuilt after WWII so you’re seeing a lot of re-creations.

Here’s the castle exterior area:

Inside, the castle has displays of armor and old weaponry but I thought this was pretty interesting. It’s a ceiling connection where you can see original castle on the left – that survived the war – right next to rebuilt ceiling:

And the other thing that was most interesting was the series of pictures of Nuremberg before and after the destruction – this is the same intersection:

From the castle, we headed over to Fembohaus, an old merchant house, built in 1596. Here’s the outside: (not my pic)

It survived the war mostly intact, which is hard to fathom when you look at the picture above. This baroque stucco ceiling inside is from 1674:

We made a quick stop in the Albrecht Durer House after this. It turns out that Albrecht is the most major artist to come out of Germany, and was a contemporary of da Vinci, Bellini and Raphael. I have never heard of Durer but it’s important to me that you know I HAVE heard of da Vinci!

The Albrecht Durer house was full of a lot of his art, which I swept right past, in order to check out the architectural details of his 5-story house, built in 1420: (pic not mine) This house also mostly survived the war, with some limited exterior damage.

Inside the Durer house, once I got away from the people in the controlled-atmosphere art rooms, I found this excellent 15th century kitchen. (Pic not mine)

As we wandered up through the levels, the doorways got shorter and shorter, until each entry was a guaranteed concussion hazard for Ron:

Finishing the Durer House in record time, we saw that our Nuremberg Card allowed us entry into the Toy Museum, filled with German families and children. It actually had some really cool displays though. Here is a collection of wooden toy horses over the span of hundreds of years, from rudimentary to fantastic:

And a huge collection of dollhouses, like this kitchen room from 1800:

And a 1908 dining room:

I think what made these doll house displays so interesting is that, later on in the museum, there was a display called “Rubble Toys”. And these were the toys that children had after the WW2 destruction of their city. They were just such a stark contrast to the elaborate toys prior to the war. Here’s a Rubble Toy doll house from 1945:

Here’s a quick break photo, of me, looking for the next free site for our Nuremberg Card:

My research led us to the Science and Technology museum which was, by far, the hit of the day. This is an awesome museum!! Seek it out if you’re in Nuremberg.

We got to try our hand at manipulating a robotic arm by flexing and releasing our arm muscles:

We got to see a mock-up of what space looks like with space junk floating around:

A medical scanner looked us over and declared Ron to be 68 years old!

And Ron made friends with an AI robot:

He also wanted to make friends with this sex robot (that is EXACTLY what the museum called it). I was going to be kind and omit this picture – and the friendship overture – from the blog. But Ron just read this post over and specifically asked that I put this picture in here:

I’ll leave you with this German sausage offering. These places are everywhere:

And this Ehekarussell (“Marriage Merry Go Round”) statue from 1981. It’s supposed to be a commentary on the course of a marriage over time: