Drei Tage in Schwaben

We’re now exiting our Schwaebische portion of the trip (a region in Southern Germany) and moving on to Munich. It’s hard to believe we’ve only been in Europe for 8 days, with everything we’ve crammed in to the last week it feels more like a month!

We arrived at noon on Tuesday from Rotterdam on a 6 hour train ride. The train system here is smooth and comfortable so the length of the trip seemed relatively short. It’s much easier to relax and catch a few Z’s on a train than a plane. We got a surprise greeting at the train station where both our host Carsten and our buddy Nick were waiting for us. We had thought Nick was meeting us in Munich so it was a welcome surprise. Carsten took us for a tour of Stuttgart which is situated in a valley and calls some 600,000 inhabitants it’s children. The city is much different then we had anticipated but very clean and scenic. Stuttgart is home to Mercedes Benz and Porsche and most of the population drives one of the two (and the rest drive Volkswagen and BMW). Needless to say this city loves it’s cars. In fact, as I write this we are currently traveling 180 km per hour on the autobahn and it’s not uncommon to see a Porsche zip by us at 200+. For car historians it’s definitely of note that Mercedes and Porsche were founded in Stuttgart and the largest Mercedes factory in the world resides here, employing some 30,000 people.

After our tour we went back to the train station and picked up our friend Kelli who is living over in Heilbronn about 60 km away. What to do from there? Self-initiated German pub crawl! We spent the night jumping from pub to pub sampling the beers (Sanwald wheat beer being a hands down favourite at the moment) and generally having a blast. Hangovers ensued but it was well worth it.

We collected our bearings and continued on to Freudenstadt on Wednesday morning. Freudenstadt is Carsten’s home town and is nestled in the Black Forest about 2 hours southwest of Stuttgart. The drive winds upwards through tall coniferous trees and the town ( pop. 25,000) sits 650m above sea level. We took a trip to an open museum a short drive away and walked through houses over 400 years old. We learned a little bit about why the ancestors settled the land which is so far above sea level and gained a new respect for their ability to survive. Also, we saw more goats. Finally we drove back to Freudenstadt and went back out to the pub for more pints and more good conversations. We met a few more of Carsten’s friends (one from New Zealand and both living in London) and called it a night.

Yesterday we cleaned ourselves up on once again and explored more of the Black Forest (including a stop for some Black Forest cake) before returning to Stuttgart. We picked up a few soccer/football tickets and proceeded to our first live European soccer game, Stuttgart vs. Bern. Now, I am a huge lover of sport and I have a fair handle on pretty much every major-league there is, but I’ll freely admit I know very little about soccer. I/we were both pleasantly surprised at how entertaining the match was and I think we’ll try and take in another couple games before we’re through. We capped the night off with, you guessed it, a few more pints and now here we are.

There are so many details I’ve left out on account of time/space but we are loving the culture change and observing major and minor differences by the minute (including a disproportionate amount of radio play for Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’) but we’ll have to report on those another time. Next up: Oktoberfest.and Design Observations Chapter 1.