72 hours in Nürnberg

I've been in Nürnberg for three days and I'm very happy so far. I am living in SudStadt (South City), which is much more residential than downtime. Nürnberg feels very similar to Salamanca for a couple reasons:
1) It looks like a stereotype of what you would imagine a German city to be (just like Salamanca does a Spanish city)
2) There is a central pedestrian street that is very touristy with tons of shops lining it
3) It's just a beautiful city

I was able to find a short-term apartment on AirBnB for USD1000 per month and the apartment and location are both good. It feels very neighborhoody and non-touristy. I've already found my go-to corner pub with 3 euro 0.5L beers and great food. I was ordering blind and ended up getting cold sausage with raw onions, tomato, and pickle vinaigrette with rye bread. It was actually very good!

Germans seem to have a thing for pickled things. The grocery store had a huge assortment of pickled items. I'm going to see if I can adopt some of their cooking techniques because it's very different to what I am used to. I had an amazing potato and mushroom strudel with fermented rosemary yogurt. It never would have occurred to me to put those ingredients together.

Here is the menu translated into English. Some of the items sounds weird but end up tasting good. Canned meat, lard with rye bread, liver sausage...

I've also continued my German language learning after taking 8 weeks of A.1.1 German at the Goethe Institut. I can pronounce words as I read, but I still have a ways too go. Key rules:

• W's are pronounced like V's
• V's are pronounced like F's. 
• S's are pronounced like Z's. Example, Siemens = Ziemenz
• There's a whole new letter ß that's pronounced like "ss"
• If there is ever an umlaut above a letter, just pretend that an "e" comes after the vowel. Example, Nürnberg ==> Nuerberg.

So this means VolksWagon is really pronounced "FolksVagon". Also, "volks" means people but it's pronounced "folks", which is also an English word for people. I've noticed a bunch of similarities with English. There are the obvious ones like ya = ja, for = fur, good = gut, but also less obvious ones like Wienen = to cry. Wienen sounds a lot like whining to me, which is similar to crying. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I bet the English word whine has it's root in German.

I'm still struggling with the German sentence structure. For some verbs, the verb goes at the end of the sentence after all the other prepositions have been said:

"I am in the shower Happy Birthday in a loud voice singing."

On the news and in the Netflix show I am watching ("Dogs of Berlin"), they discuss the ongoing social tension between conservative white Germans / right-wing groups and other ethnic groups like Turks. I have also noticed a Turkish presence in my neighborhood. This is a gross generalization, but it seems like Turks are like Mexicans in the United States. They came originally for economic opportunity and now have well established communities, but there is backlash from the people who were "here" first who feel like they are losing their identity / cultural superiority.

Mesut Özil is one of the best soccer players in the world currently playing for Arsenal and scoring the winning goal in overtime against Argentina in the World Cup Final in 2014. Özil is of Turkish decent but played for the German National Team. In 2018 after Germany's embarrassing elimination in group stage at World Cup, Özil was scapegoated with someone racist undertones, causing him to retire from the national team at just 29 years old (hardly past his prime).

I begin work tomorrow and must commute by train as I have still not purchased a bicycle. I had planned to buy my bike on Saturday as I knew shops would be closed on Sunday. What I didn't expect was that shops would only be open from 10 am - 1 pm on Saturday and I woke up at 11:30 am. Europeans know how to live. Once I have my bicycle, my commute will be 24 km / 15 miles each way, so I will need a decent bike.

That's all Volks!