Stuttgart

At 5 pm on Thursday, December 29th, we took the metro to the Madrid airport and walked forever through the airport to get to the check-in, and then waited for our (delayed) flight to Germany. When it finally took off, we flew over France and Switzerland, all we could see was clusters of lights in the darkness -- some towns and cities we were unsure of. We arrived in Stuttgart about 10 pm and took the S-Bahn (light rail) from the airport to the Hauptbanhauf (train station) in the center of the city. The tourist information was closed at the airport but we did find a booklet listing all the hotels in Stuttgart. It had a really detailed map. We knew the street name of the hostel and knew that it was near the train station, but had no idea where to start looking. We divided up the map by square sections and started looking at each and every long street name. German isn’t easy. We learned that street (strasse) is abbreviated as str. Double ‘s’ can be written as β. So streets are also written as straβe. That was only the beginning of the confusion. Charlie finally found the street the hostel is on, and we decided to get a taxi as it wasn’t very far so it wouldn’t be an expensive taxi fare and we also didn’t want to walk through the snow and cold. It was snowy and very very cold. It was the first time I had seen snow this year too. The taxi driver didn’t speak english so we wrote down the address for him and pointed it out on the map. The entrance to the hostel isn’t on the street listed as the address, it’s on a hill and you have to go down some stairs to another street to get to the front door. Some German woman helped us out by yelling something in German from her apartment balcony and pointing out where to go. So we finally got there and went into our room with 4 beds. Two people were also staying in our room, just their stuff was there when we got there, they came home late. They were German, we said “hallo” and that was it.

We ate breakfast at the hostel (lots of sausage and cheese in addition to normal breakfast food like yogurt fruit, coffee and cereal). We took our backpacks to the train station and put them in a luggage locker and then got back on the S-Bahn and went to the Mercedes-Benz plant at the edge of Stuttgart. A free shuttle bus took us through the plant and to the museum. The museum was really nice, had free lockers and free audio guides. It started with the world’s first motorbike, built in 1882. It is a little wooden bike with a huge motor that has a 0.5 horsepower motor and its top speed is only 12 km/h. There were lots of mint condition old cars; some really cool old racecars, the newest racecars, and some cars from the “Million Mile Club” - Mercedes Benz cars with over 1 million miles. One was a former taxi car from Greece that has almost 5 million kilometers on it, or 6 trips to the moon and back. The end of the museum had the 2006 fleet of Mercedes-Benz cars, all really nice cars. They are moving the museum into a brand new building in a few months, so we should go back next year.

We went back to the train station and walked down the shopping area and through the main plaza. There were a lot of people out. There was a winter fest with ice-skating and food stands. We got a couple schnitzel things and went to a sausage stand where everything on the menu was really hard to pronounce so we ordered the only thing that was easy to say, “currywurst”. It was a chopped-up bratwurst with ketchup and curry powder on top. We at the whole thing with two little forks before they gave us the dinner roll that you are supposed to put the sausage in before eating. Whatever – Charlie ate the roll with some peanut butter and gnutella later on. Stuttgart is big and modern, and along with Munich it’s the heart of Germany’s high tech industry. It’s not a very beautiful city with much to see, so we were glad we didn’t stay more than half a day.