Our weekend in Nürnberg and Munich was fantastic. It was good not to think about my thesis for 48 hours.

I have some great photos, but have not had time to sort them out yet. I brought just 4 with me to work today: Nürnberg viewed from the castle, the toy guitars on one of the stalls in the Christkindlesmarkt, me and my Spanish friends drinking Glühwein in Marienplatz in Munich, and a late night illicit visit to the Munich Olympic stadium. I'll hopefully have the rest ready for tomorrow.

Nürnberg - the city is really beautiful, which is all the more amazing when you see pictures of what it looked like after the war. The hostel we stayed in had a book of photos - practically every old building was reduced to rubble. Most of the main old churches have been completely restored, and some around the edges of town left in ruins. One of them, I think it was St. Sebald's, had a cross that came from one of the towers on the old Coventry cathedral inside as part of a peace exhibition, which was nice. You can't really take good photos of the inside of these places, or at least I can't manage it with my camera, but there was really incredible art and architecture to see. One notable thing was that even in the protestant churches, they have still preserved very carefully all the statues and paintings from pre-reformation times. No Oliver Cromwell around to burn them all.

Christkindlesmarkt The Nürnberg Christmas market is also beautiful. It's huge, it's centred on the old town market square but also extends all over the old part of town, with stalls for toys, ornaments, books, sweets, sausages, Glühwein, slippers, and carousels for children and stalls with displays of model railways.. it's just great. You can watch all these little kids walking round pointing at things with wide open mouths, it really gets you in the mood for Christmas. And it's the total antithesis of big town Christmas shopping, with crowds and stressed out people and unfriendly, tired staff. Instead, everyone is relaxed and is taking their time, stopping to drink Glühwein and talk to their friends, and the stallholders are all friendly because they are trying to sell their own stuff. The atmosphere is really nice.

München Munich is also a really beautiful city. Some of the churches in the old town are absolutely stunning. There's a small church with a beautiful interior called the Damenstiftkirche, and another with a packed rococo interior that is really breathtaking, called the Asamkirche. The architecture of the old town generally is very grand but tasteful - when I put up the photos tomorrow, dear reader, you can judge for yourself.

Hofbrauhaus This is where you really get to grips with Munich. It's a tourist trap to an extent, an enourmous beer cellar with large benches and tables and 1-litre glasses as standard and beer brewed on the premises. Really good stuff, plenty of Bavarian singing and thumping the table and waving your glass in the air. The other guys on our table were all very friendly too, 5 Germans and a Swiss. Though there were a lot of tourists there, they all seemed to be German tourists, mostly with organised package tours and tired looking tour guides trying to convince them to stop drinking and come back to the bus. The guy next to us was from Cologne, he'd flown down for the football game the previous day and was getting seriously into the Bavarian way of doing things. All the singing and the waitresses costumes were pretty daft, but it was great to be in a place where you could actually see hundreds of Germans enjoying themselves! You don't see it a lot in Karlsruhe. I felt about 3 times better about Germany when we left the place, somewhat unsteadily, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

In the guidebook Eduardo read that Bavarians drink 1700 litres of beer each every year! We didn't believe it at the time, but by the time we left the Hofbrauhaus, we believed it. In fact, we didn't just believe it, we knew it to be true.