Europe > Cruises > Reviews > Emerald Star > Photos > Pre-cruise: Erlangen

Emerald Star Cruise Photos

From: Emerald Waterways cruise review: Nuremberg-Trier

Pre-cruise stay: Erlangen

ABOVE: The cobblestoned streets of Erlangen's Altstadt are lined with historic buildings, shops, cafés, and restaurants.

Erlangen is a university city of about 106,000 people near Nuremberg, Germany. The Main-Danube Canal passes Erlangen, and some Danube cruises that supposedly begin or end in Nuremberg use Erlangen as a port.

We spent several days in Erlangen before our Emerald Star cruise from Nuremberg to Trier--not because our ship departed from Erlangen (it left from Nuremberg's cruise port), but because Cheryl lived in Erlangen for several years during her childhood and we hadn't visited the city in quite a few years.

Our visit to Erlangen began at the Hauptbahnhof Erlangen, which is the city's main railroad station. (Click here and maximize your browser window for a larger panoramic image.)

The station, which opened in 1844, has four platforms and is served by long-distance trains as well as S-Bahn and regional commuter trains from Nuremberg. Travel time between Nuremberg's main railway station and Erlangen is 16 to 27 minutes, with "R" regional trains being faster than S-Bahn trains.

From the train station, we walked about 10 minutes to the Hotel Rokokohaus, where we'd reserved a room through our hotel partner, Booking.com.

The Rokokohaus is located on the Theaterplatz in Erlangen's Altstadt (Old Town), just north of the city's Botanical Gardens.

Behind the Rococo façade, which dates to the 1750s, is a comfortable hotel where some rooms face the park and others have wooden balconies overlooking a pretty courtyard. (Five of the hotel's 42 rooms are in a Dependance, or annex, on the square.)

After unpacking, we took a short walk to the center of town.

One of the first sights we passed was the Schloss, or Castle, which was commissioned in 1700 for the Markgrafen ("margraves") of Brandenberg-Bayreuth who ruled the city from 1603 to 1810.

The castle is now the seat of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, a.k.a. the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

A block south was the Hugenottenplatz, where we'd been surprised to find a McDonald's occupying an historic building during our previous visit in 1978. The McDonald's was still there after nearly four decades.

Also present was a bookmobile of the Stadtbibliotek or public library of Erlangen.

The dominant building on the square was the Hugenottenkirche, which opened in 1693 as the signature building of the newly-planned Baroque city center.

TThe church was financed by the local ruler at the time, Markgraf Christian Ernst von Brandenburg-Bayreuth, who had encouraged Huguenots (Protestant refugees from France) to settle in Erlangen. The church offered services in French until 1822.

Downtown Erlangen appeared to have at least one bakery per block (sometimes two).

On our next visit, we'll stay long enough to rent a vacation apartment and subsist on whole-grain German rye bread, seeded rolls, peanut butter, and cold cuts for a week.

Erlangen is a university city with faculties scattered across town, so a bicycle is almost a necessity if you're a student. We saw bikes parked by the dozen, usually with cheap cable locks or even no locks at all.

Even our hotel had bicycles that were parked in the lobby for guests to borrow free of charge.

In the window of this shop, we saw the largest selection of of bicycle bells (mounted on a bike) that we'd ever witnessed.

The shop also had a good assortment of toys (both traditional and modern), including something that we hadn't seen before: a folding red wagon made of steel tubing and cloth.

As we walked around the business district, we saw a sign for a  shopping mall that positioned Erlangen as a world-class city.

The mall, named the Erlangen Arcaden, was in the heart of downtown, where it surrounded by thriving shops and department stores.

We aren't big fans of shopping malls, but we thought the Erlangen Arcaden was more appealing than most with its large skylight and curving layout.

We also liked the fact that, in typical German fashion, the mall had shops where people could make everyday purchases--including bakeries, a pharmacy, and a branch of Germany's Post Office.

By now, we were feeling hunger pangs, so we refueled at the Eishaus, which had attracted a steady stream of customers on a hot summer day.

 We spent the rest of the afternoon just walking around and enjoying the city.

This photo shows the a monument to German reunification on October 3, 1990, with the inscription "Deutschland ist unteilbar" ("Germany is indivisible").

The city's community-garden organization, the Heimgartengesellschaft Erlangen, was founded during World War I. It consists of 80 garden allotments in five "colonies," including this 12-garden parcel on Artilleriestrasse.

We read the list of rules, which require that at least a third of a member's allotment must be planted in fruit and/or vegetables, in keeping with the original purpose of the gardens.

Germany was competing in the EUFA EURO championship tournament during our visit, and Deutschland's football fans proudly displayed their team's colors in Erlangen.

Erlangen has a large international population, thanks to its university and global companies like Siemens, so it didn't come as a complete surprise to see a "Take away for free" sign in English.

At the opposite end of the linguistic spectrum was a sign for Maria's Beer Garden in Franconian dialect.

Erlangen has many modern buildings (due to a combination of World War II bombing and postwar growth), but you'll still find traditional houses in and around the city center.

The city's apartment houses are mostly faced with stucco, and the building owners don't want their façades scuffed or nicked by bicycles. The solution: Railings that run along the buildings at waist height, providing a convenient place for bicycle owners to lean or lock their bikes.

We were intrigued by the way some older apartment buildings (including these converted turn-of-the-20th-Century barracks) had been updated with elevator towers and bolted-on balconies.

Erlangen's university has a medical school, and the town is well-equipped with hospitals and clinics of every description--among them, a Frauenklinik or women's clinic with a colorful sculpture of a man and a woman near the maternity entrance.

The statue was created by Prof. Stephan Balkenhol in 2009. It's mounted on a pedestal that rotates with the wind, allowing the statue to change direction from day to day.

Having tried to fend off lag by walking, we returned to the Altstadt (where our hotel was located) as our energy began to flag.

TThis pink house was typical of buildings in the Old Town. So was the cobblestoned pavement in front.

The Altstadt was a pleasant areas of cafés, restaurants, small shops, and historic buildings.

Many buildings in the Altstadt, such as this house made of stone, had traditional Franconian shutters with diagonal patterns.

Gilded wrought-iron signs identified a wine merchant and a bakery.

For Germans with Karl May Wild West tastes, the Altstadt had a bar & grill named Arizona that featured hamburgers, steaks, Tex-Mex specialties, and other symbols of the "American way of life " (including "Supersize Day" on Monday).

AAfter eating dinner at a restaurant that served hearty German food--not easy to find in the Altstadt--we returned to  the Hotel Rokokohaus.

There, while exploring the premises, we discovered that the hotel's Solarium did double duty as an ironing room for guests who wanted to fantasize a beach vacation while pressing the wrinkles out of their shirts, skirts, and underwear.

Next day:

Our second day in Erlangen began with breakfast (included in the rates) at the Hotel Rokokohaus. It had the standard German hotel-breakfast choices, such as white and wholegrain breads, pastries, Muesli, fruit, yogurt, ham, and cheese.

Our destination for the day was Röthelheimpark, a neighborhood that had been redeveloped after the departure of the U.S. Army from Ferris Barracks, where Cheryl lived for several years during her childhood.

Our first stop was at Cheryl's old U.S. military elementary school, which is now the Wirtschaftsscule im Röthelheimpark Erlangen.

It was a Saturday, so the Wirtsschaftschule was closed, but a look through the gate made it obvious (at least to Cheryl) that the school looked much as it did when Cheryl was in third and fourth grade.

Not far away, a park was on the site of the former Army post, and a series of stone markers offered a timeline of the area from 1893 (when it was a German infantry Exerzierplatz or parade ground) to its rebirth as a park, nature reserve, and urban redevelopment in 1997.

No selfie stick? No problem, when you're in a park with a mirrored statue of a rabbit.

Cheryl's family had lived off-post, on Johann-Kalb-Strasse, and that neighborhood hadn't been disrupted by the replacement of Ferris Barracks by the Röthelheimpark.

The apartment house where her family lived was still intact, although it was no longer military housing.

The front door was closed when we took the top photo, but when we walked past later, it was open--and Cheryl couldn't resist going in to check out the staircase and the view from the landing outside her old apartment

One amenity that she didn't recall from her childhood was a candy machine on the street near Johann-Kalb-Strasse 21.

Another new addition was the Franconian International School (opened in 1998), which serves English-speaking pupils of 40 nationalities who live in Erlangen, Nuremberg, and other cities in the region.

We were impressed by the flag stencilling on an FIS building, which added visual texture to the smooth stucco façade.

Signs at a nearby city sports field made it clear that American soldiers might be gone from Erlangen, but their cultural influence lived on.

Wandering through the past had made us hungry, so we stopped for pastries and drinks at a bakery near the new Campus Röthelheimpark shopping area.

On our walk back to the city center, we passed an apartment building populated by trompe l'oeil tenants.

A sign for Book-It, a company that rents extended-stay apartments in Erlangen, featured a great tagline in English: "Have a nice stay."

A Dirndl and Tracht shop beckoned as we passed through downtown, but we resisted the temptation to buy his-and-her Franconian outfits.

On a previous visit, we'd seen a Bratwurst stand in front of Erlangen's modern city hall. This time, it was gone, having been replaced by a California-themed snack bar with Mexican specialties just down the street.

Our sausage nostalgia was replaced by surprise as we encountered a parade of animal characters on Erlangen's main street.

Even ersatz animals get thirsty on hot summer days.

A few minutes later, we saw a real animal (a frog) in Erlangen's Botanical Garden, which we cut through on our way to the Hotel Rokokohaus.

Back in the hotel, we raided the minibar and cooled off on our room's balcony. (The hotel's minibar charges were extremely reasonable, and the friendly proprietor ended up knocking them off the bill: "They're on the house," he said as we checked out the next morning.)

The next day, we walked to Erlangen's Hauptbahnhof, where trains to Nuremberg ran two or three times per hour (even on a Sunday morning).

The station was busier than we'd expected, with people, flora, and fauna in abundance.

We bought our tickets at a vending machine, then headed for the S-Bahn platform,where a train arrived in due course.

About half an hour later, we were at the main railroad station in Nuremberg, where a luggage conveyor did the heavy lifting while we walked up the stairs from the train platform.