WINE DINE & TRAVEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 3 2016

ter. When I wasn’t Christmas marketing,
I inspected jeweled treasures at
the Faberge Museum, wandered among
modern and contemporary masterpieces
at the Richard Meier-designed Frieder
Burda Museum, even lucked out and
landed a seat at a Cassandra Wilson concert
at Festspielhaus, Germany’s largest
concert hall, opened in 1998 in the former
Baden-Baden railway station.
Of course, I saved time for another
dip into Baden-Baden’s thermal waters.
This time I chose an afternoon at
historic Friedrichsbad, a Roman-style
bath where swimsuits are verboten. For
nearly 140 years, it has been a bathing
temple. Mark Twain swore he lost his
rheumatism here, and described the
place this way: “Here at the Friedrichsbad,
you lose track of time within
10 minutes and track of the world
within 20....”
Baden-Baden would be a hard act to
follow, but the next morning I was
off to the train station. Destination:
Nuremberg.
The first written record of the Nuremberg’s
Christkindlesmarkt dates to
1628. Since then it has become one
of the most popular holiday markets
in Europe, drawing about 2 million
visitors each December to this city of
500,000.
There are actually three Christmas
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