The Kitchen, Really?

Imagine my surprise when we started looking at apartments, and we would walk into rooms like this one and the realtor would announce "And this is the kitchen...". Only, you know, in German. I knew that apartments here didn't come with stoves, ovens, cupboards, etc but I was unprepared for a completely empty room. The only things signifying this room as the kitchen are the water and range hookups. Also,  there are no light fixtures in of any the rooms, just wires coming out of the ceiling.

Well, the kitchen pictured above is our kitchen. Only now it has a refrigerator and all of our boxes filled with kitchen items in it. We were able to arrange a deal with our landlord that we would pay extra rent if he had a kitchen installed. We just got word that will happen on November 8th. It sounded tragic until I heard about another American adidas couple that will have to wait until January to get theirs.

Nuremberg's Altstadtfest (Old Town Festival)

 I'm not gonna lie; I'm a little behind, and this post is pretty lazy.

A couple weekends ago Josh and I met up with some of his coworkers to check out Nuremberg's own Altstadtfest. This end of September celebration occurs in the old town marketplace and in a park along the Pegnitz river. Like so many other festivals in Germany the primary focus is on food and bier. Basically, my kind of event!  And while it does overlap with the beginning of Oktoberfest only a couple hours away in Munich, I don't think Oktoberfest has this as one of the main events! 

Nuremberg's Altstadtfest logo (borrowed from the official website)

The marketplace portion of the festival. All over there were temporary wooden beer huts set up and decorated in a "harvest" motif . Most of what you'll see in these picture are temporary building put up just for the festival. 

Ahhh, yes....where we spent most of our time drinking Schanzenbrau biers which are really good.....

....and have a kick-ass logo!

We were pretty happy about the bier.

We went back a few nights later and were treated to a German band covering US "hits" from approximately 1980 - 1997. I had  forgotten that some of those songs even existed, but they ended up making perfect background music for

FIREWORKS!