Jess's Christmas Adventures · Diary No. 2

Nuremberg: Red Pandas, Warm Soup, and One Plum Man

Christmas trip·Nuremberg, Germany

I woke up at 5:30am. No alarm. There's a pair of red pandas in my head these days — curled asleep in a tree fork at our zoo, tails over their noses. They did not need me at all. That, apparently, is what woke me up.

Stop two of the great week-off loop. Strasbourg was still glowing in my head — storks, lanterns, that enormous tree — when the train carried me east across Germany, a few hours of dark fields and lit windows, and tipped me out in Nuremberg the evening before so I could have the whole day. Two cities in, and my notebook already smells of cinnamon and train corridors. Flask of tea, Barnaby's latest dictation half-finished (a hedgehog, a squirrel, and the mystery of the vanishing winter stores), and a plan with three parts: zoo, lunch, market. Keeper's orders. My own.

The zoo

First stop, before anything: Tiergarten Nürnberg, because if I don't start with the zoo, who even am I? It's a Landschaftszoo — a landscape zoo — spread over more than sixty hectares of the old imperial forest, with the enclosures tucked into former sandstone quarries and beech woods, so half the time you're walking through a forest and an animal simply appears in it, exactly where a rock face or a pond says it should be. It's one of the largest zoos in Europe, and nobody sensible hurries it. I clocked the important things keeper-style: generous space, proper shade, water where water belongs, feeding spots scattered so the animals forage instead of queueing.

And then, in the Himalaya trees, my red pandas. Not my actual red pandas — theirs. One was asleep in a fork exactly like ours, tail over nose. The other woke up while I watched, sat up in the cold morning light, and washed its face with both paws, very thoroughly, like a small red cat with somewhere important to be. I understood that panda completely. I took no photos. Some colleagues you just say good morning to.

Lunch

Back into the centre, footsore and starving, to a little inn down a side street off the Hauptmarkt — no name worth writing down, just low beams, steamed-up windows and the smell of something good happening in the back. I had a bowl of soup thick enough to stand a spoon in, dark bread, and a hot chocolate while the feeling came back into my toes. Outside, the lanes were filling up. Inside, nobody was in a hurry, including me. This is my whole review: warm, quiet, and exactly where I needed to be before the afternoon.

The market

Then came my mandatory wrong turn. I was aiming straight for the Hauptmarkt and took a narrow lane between the old houses instead, ending up in a quiet courtyard with a well, cobbles, and nobody trying to sell me anything. I sat on the edge of the well and drank tea from my flask with the church bells going, and it was better than wherever I'd been heading. It always is.

And then the market itself: rows and rows of stalls with red-and-white striped roofs under the Frauenkirche, like a whole field of deckchairs filled with gingerbread and candlelight. They say the Christkind herself opens it all — a young woman in gold and white, reciting a prologue from the church gallery — and the whole square still feels like part of the story she started. I ate my Drei im Weggla standing up (three little Nuremberg sausages in one bread roll, eaten with your fingers, exactly as tradition demands), did a serious tasting round of Elisenlebkuchen, the famous flourless gingerbread, and bought some for the zoo team. I also ate some. Both things can be true.

Last purchase, as the lights came on: a Zwetschgenmännle. Little men — rows of them at the stalls — built from dried plums with walnut heads, a tradition here that goes back centuries. Naturally, I inspected mine the way I'd inspect a new enrichment feed: plums, excellent fibre; walnut, good for foraging teeth. He passed. He now stands on my office desk holding a cocktail-stick sword, keeping order among the paperwork. He takes the job very seriously. I respect that in a plum.

Home

Not home, not yet. Onwards: the train up the line a few hours to Dresden, tired, a bit sticky with gingerbread glaze, notebook smelling of cinnamon, one small plum man travelling in state in my bag. Two down, three to go — and honestly, I could get used to this.

— Jess

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