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.

Germany Day 3 - Nuremberg / Heidelberg

Day 3 - Dec 7.


We woke up early on Wednesday and headed for Heidelberg. The weather for this drive was a bit nicer, with only rain.  This would be a common theme for the rest of the trip as it pretty much rained each remaining day we were in Germany. The drive was our longest single day drive at roughly 2 and a half hours.


Heidelberg was of historical significance due to it being the residence of the Electoral Palatinate, or elected leader of the Palatinate territory of the Holy Roman Empire.  The town is located in a romantic setting along the River Neckar. If you want to know more, I've included the Heidelberg wikipedia site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidelberg

Inner courtyard of the castle. The large building in front is the
only full building not in some amount of disrepair or ruin.

View from the castle terrace down toward Heidelberg and the River Neckar

Upon arrival in Heidelberg, we immediately headed the castle.  The castle has been in partial ruins for hundreds of years and to be honest this castle has a long history of conquest... I won't go into details since we didn't really learn much about the castle when we were there, though it is interesting to read about now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidelberg_Castle  When we arrived at the castle, we were surprised by how un-helpful the castle workers were.  No one knew where the audio guide person was (the booth was supposed to be open), there was no literature anywhere (in German or English), and we pretty much stumbled on the English tour location. While waiting for the tour, we met a nice couple from California and had a good laugh about how incompetent the castle workers seemed...  

Surprisingly, the tour was quite good. Our tour guide was a very sarcastic French woman who had a fun sense of humor. She seemed to enjoy highlighting the shortcomings of the men who had occupied the castle over it's long history.  Before going more into the tour, we actually explored a bit on our own and happened upon the largest wine barrel in the world.  This barrel was located on the lowest level of the castle and was immense.  I don't know a lot of the history, but it was built to house the local tax wine.  Each local farmer was required to pay a percentage of his yearly wine production to the castle lord and this is where the wine went.  It was actually a collection of all sorts of alcohol: beer, white wine, red wine amongst other things. It held 55,000 gallons and was full 3 times while it was in use.  According to our tour guide, the practice of boiling water to kill bacteria wasn't known at the time, so pretty much everyone drank alcohol.  People even bathed in alcohol out of fear of death. 


One of our tour guide's interesting stories was about a famous proprietor of the barrel.  One of the court jesters was an Italian midget named Perkeo.  He was placed in charge of the barrel and developed a nickname which translates to "why not?" due to his proclivity towards drink and his common response of "why not" when offered a glass of wine.  He is claimed to have drank up to 18 bottles of wine each day.  Ironically enough, the cause of his death is claimed to be his first-ever glass of water.  He was dead the next day. Seems unlikely, but you never know.

Front of the barrel
(Notice the 2nd story doorway to the left)

Yuka on top of the barrel. It was huge.

Schloss (Castle) Heidelberg in it's complete, unruined state.

One of the castle moats (They were occasionally filled, but because the red
 limestone seeped so much they were later abandoned as moats)

Our tour guide next to the wine pump...

Interior hallway with elaborate ceiling.

7 Heavenly pursuits and ruined building behind. 2 are missing: Chastity and Humility

An interesting mount. They were all over the place.

These guys were all fat, short and
rocking the cockpiece

The last story our tour guide told was about the cock pieces we noticed on the statues around the castle. Apparently, over the years, these pieces kept getting longer and longer and at some point a rule was created stating that none of the pieces could be longer than 10 inches.  She mentioned that Henry VIII was famous for storing chocolates in his that he would give to ladies. Interesting...


We then headed down to the old part of Heidelberg.  We had lunch at a local brewhouse called Vetter's.  The food there was excellent. The bratwurst and German potatos were great and the wheat beer I had was the best I've ever tasted. 

Bratwurst, German potatos and sauerkraut at Vetters.

Yuka enjoying the local brew at Vetter's. It was the best.

After lunch we walked around the old town.  The Christmas market was quite small compared to Munich and Nuremberg. We spent most of the remaining time in Heidelberg visiting the sights like the student jail at the university of Heidelberg and had a nice relaxing dinner.

Gatehouse at the Old Bridge
in Heidelberg

Heidelberg Stadtkirche

Schloss Heidelberg in the background

Student jail at the University of Heidelberg - Interesting graffiti everywhere.
Apparently the university police had the authority to imprison students. There were
a massive number of the black head profiles. I'm not sure of the significance, but
it was interesting.

One of only a few pics I took of the Christmas market. We saw vendors like these pretty much in every city we visited. This is a larger version of a common German toy (I don't know what they are called)

When we headed back to the hotel we saw this metallic
Predator displayed in an art gallery. Pretty neat.

Even though the Christmas market was quite small, there was so much to see and do in Heidelberg we really enjoyed our time there.  It was definitely a romantic city and I would recommend going there to anyone, if only for the atmosphere and the castle.




Picasa web album for Day 3