City of Stuttgart

Today after our time in the school, we got to take a tour of the city. It was great weather for a tour, about 20 C (68 F) with lots of nice, warm sun! We got off the train at Stadtmitte; the station is under the Koenig Straße. On one side of Koenig Straße is a shopping mall called Königbau (King's building?), to another could we see the main train station with it's rotating Mercedes logo on top, and opposite the Königbau was "The New Castle". "The New Castle" was from when Germany was particularized (Mr. Nicholas likes) and had many small states ruled by kings. The castle was quite big but I'm not sure the size in comparison to the one in Munich. From the street could we also see the Stuttgarter Zeitung (local newspaper), high-class restaurants and a fairly new, modern art gallery and houses on the hill. Frau Reuter, the teacher who joined us from FPGZ, told us that Stuttgart was in a bowl with hills surrounding and a river, the Neckar, flowing through. These houses on the hills are where everyone wants to be living because they are much larger and have better views.

As we continued on we saw a pond area that had been drained. We were told it normally has water but was drained because of the abnormal winter. From the pond we saw a bridge were you could bike from this park we were in to another park. Frau Reuter said that all of the parks are interconnected so, if one knew their way around Stuttgart, you could bike everywhere quite easily. Also, was the capital building for the state Stuttgart is in, Baden-Württemberg.

We walked back to the Koenig Straße and all had some ice cream. Yum, I had a scope of raspberry on a scope of strawberry. We sat in the warm sun as we ate and discussed some funny stories of the trip. Then we walked around some more to look around Stuttgart. We went by city hall and a large square. In the winter, just before Christmas, people set up small stands and sell gifts and food. Some of us went to a toy store with a lot of cool, little kid toys. The others went to a store across the way, but I don't know what it was (help!). Next we bought some post cards and Sophia bought a nice pencil case with pencils and eraser. Some of us then returned back to the school to get picked up by our partners with Frau Reuter while others stayed with Frau Russell to shop.

Guess who also made it three hours without speaking and gets a free lunch in Berlin! Yeah, I did! I love betting (and food and free i.e. having more money)...

This street is also the main shopping area for the people of Stuttgart so there was a lot of people walking around the shops (also a lot of shops). With all the people, we saw a lot of cool street performers.

PS (Unrelated Stuff) Robin had a Handball game on Sunday... The refs cause them to lose with 5 seconds left 32-31. They didn't respect the coach's request for a timeout. Handball was still really cool to watch. Also enjoyed my first trip on the Autobahn; we got to 190 km/h which is around 120 mph!