Germany Day 4 - Heidelberg / Stuttgart

Saw a lot of wheat fields during our drives.
Didn't see much livestock or pastures. It was
mostly wheat and the occasional vineyard as
we got closer to Stuttgart

Day 4 - Dec 8




We woke early Thursday morning and drove to Stuttgart, part of the way along the Romantic Road.


One reason we wanted to see Stuttgart was because the Christmas market was supposed to be one of the biggest in all of Germany.  Aside from the Christmas market, Stuttgart was also a place where my oldest brother Jack lived for a few months while in college.  He had good things to say about it so we added it to our list.  

Stuttgart was a pretty major industrial site during WWII and as such was pretty badly targeted. I'll leave the wikipedia page for you to learn the local history.

Yuka in the futuristic elevator of the
Mercedes Benz museum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart




One of the major local industries was the automotive industry with it being the headquarters of both Porsche and Mercedes Benz.  As such, we decided to visit the Mercedes Benz museum. It was easy to tell we were getting close to the museum when pretty much every car in the area became Mercs.  At one point we were stopped at a red light and I didn't see any cars (aside from ours) that weren't Mercs. Crazy.  The museum was a modern piece of art.  Tickets were purchased in the center on the ground floor, a space-age elevator took everyone to the top, where the tour began and in a timeline fashion we worked our way from the first automobile all the way down to modern Formula 1 cars. I don't think Yuka enjoyed it as much as I did...

Daimler Motorized Carriage - the world's first
four-wheeled automobile - 1890s

Mercedes Benz race car carrier - This thing would transport Merc racing cars at over 100 mph.

Mercedes Benz Gullwing

Mercedes Benz racing car display. There were more racing cars further to the right.

Land speed record car built in the late 1930s. Was never official run due to the
war effort being ramped up in Germany

We noticed that in Germany all plastic bottles
were really heavy and some appeared to have
been reused. This is a bottle/can recycling
machine. Put a bottle in, the machine rotates
it, reads the barcode and adds up your tab.
Some bottles were worth 1 Euro. Nice way to
promote recycling.

After spending a few hours there, we headed towards the city center. Once again, Yuka did a great job of planning and had us staying in a very nice Hostel (with parking) just a few minutes from the city center.  The only bad part about the Hostel was the weird square spiral staircase that was particularly punishing.  Since we'd been traveling non-stop (and the stairs wore us out), we decided to skip out on the local day-time attractions and rested a bit with our sights set on an evening at the Christmas market.  


After a 10 minute walk we were in the city center.  The Christmas market was huge and by far the busiest of any we experienced while in Germany.  One of the first things we experienced was a choir in the courtyard of the city hall.


Seeing the entire Christmas market took us around 2 hours.  It was really nice even though there were so many people.  Luckily, the weather held out and we didn't get rained on this evening.

Christmas Choir.

Christmas Market

Christmas Market

Christmas Market

Christmas Market

LEGO display

Yuka enjoying the LEGO  Santa.

LEGO truck.

Large statue in the central square next to the city hall.

After walking around the Christmas Market, we decided to see some of the local shops. We happened upon this really neat LEGO display. The coolest display was the truck with a working boom that moved around.  

Stuttgart city hall.

We ended the night in Stuttgart relatively early. We even had a beer at the Hostel bar.

Picasa web album of Day 4.