I know two sorts of pretzels. Snack pretzels, which are essentially those hard salt stick thingies in pretzel shape, and real pretzels. I should mention that I live in Germany (currently Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but Bavaria before that) and should therefore, perhaps, be regarded as the authority on the subject. (hooray! I'm a pretzel authority! Now there's a title to be proud of.) From the rest of the thread, I think I can deduce that whatever you eat, it's not quite what I think pretzels are. Pretzels are regular dough in pretzel shape dipped in what my English dictionary claims to be sodium leach or lye, and then baked and equipped with salt. The result is a dark brown skin around the pretzel, and large, white salt lumps (not single crystals, probably). The finíshed pretzel should be somewhere between soft and hard, otherwise it means that they're either badly done or old.
Sadly they don't sell good pretzels around here, so I'm looking forward to getting to eat some on my upcoming holiday in Bavaria. You couldn't BELIEVE the things they're sometimes trying to sell as pretzels here. Yuck. Last summer (I think it was) the local shopping centre had what they called "Bavarian Weeks" or something in that direction. So they decorated everything in blue and white, played horrible mock Bavarian folk music, and the bakeries sold the WORST PRETZELS EVER. I think I could almost do better. They were yellow and soft and COVERED in salt. I'm not exaggerating. They had a CRUST of salt, about two millimetres thick. I like salty things personally, but this was ridiculous. I managed to eat it, but then had to drink something, or I would have had to throw up. Perhaps that was the idea.

Fuzz"Schwerin=Pretzel desert"pilz

P.S.
It's not as though they don't sell decent pretzels at all in this part of Germany. There's a bakery/kiosk chain from Stuttgart (I think) called Ditz that, among other things, sells passable pretzels, but for some reason they have never come to Schwerin, though there is one in Rostock, which is even further north.

P.P.S.
I suppose that was an atlas-heavy post.