Weekend

The weather has been nice this weekend, or at the very least warmer than it's been. Here that means it's been above 50 Fahrenheit, though I doubt that will last for long. Also, it's almost Halloween! Halloween here is actually a national holiday, though it's only recently started being celebrated the way Americans think of Halloween here. So I'll be on the lookout for trick or treaters. I also noticed that most store have started putting there Christmas stuff out, sometimes mixed in with the Halloween stuff!

Monster eggs and Santas

Anyway, this weekend started Saturday morning with absolutely perfect weather. I had decided to visit the Porsche museum, so I set out from the train station.

Clear skies on Saturday

But since it was on the way I decided to stop by the flea market at Karlsplatz. It's actually really nice that it's there every weekend. I love visiting flea markets and they're not as frequent back in Philadelphia when I'm in school, or at least the ones I can walk to anyway. Even if I don't buy anything, which often happens, it's still fun to look at everything. This time I ended up buying some more olympic pins, this time from the 1956 and 1980 Olympics.

Day at the market

Olympic pins

After that I walked through Schlossplatz on the way to the U-bahn station. Quite a few people were out and about enjoying the nice weather.

Schlossplatz

After a short train ride, I was at the Porsche museum. 

Porsche Museum

Like the Mercedes museum, they had a lot of examples of Porsche cars throughout the years. Starting with the first cars made by the founder Ferdinand Porsche, like this race car.

They also had one of the first Volkswagens, since Ferdinand Porsche was one of the primary designers of it and the first Porsche sports car is based on it.

Das Auto

The spot with the first Porsche though, was empty!

Lucky for me though, it was still in the building. I think there was going to be an event that evening because I saw the first Porsche was moved to this stage area.

You can see the similarity to the Volksawagen in this Porsche from the 50's

Porsche didn't just make race cars and sports cars though.

Porsche Tractor

Porsche jeep from the 50's

Also got to see their trophy display, and according to them they've won over 30,000 automotive victories over the years.

Porsche trophy display

I also thought it was interesting, but they also have a Porsche that's modified to look like the one in Pixar's Cars.

This is weirder to see in real life, the eyes look segmented when you get up close.

The finally, exclusive Porsche wine was available in the gift shop.

Porsche wine, cause why not?

Sunday started was decidedly less nice but it wasn't raining so I headed out to my destination for the day, the palace in Ludwigsburg.

Train station on Sunday

It was a fairly long train ride, Ludwigsburg is on the northeastern edge of the city while I'm on the southwestern, but at least by the time I got there the weather had cleared up a bit. 

Ludwigsburg

Until 1918, Ludwigsburg was the home of the king of Württemberg. The palace is huge with apartments, offices, a theater, great halls, and two churches(one protestant, the other catholic). They don't let you take pictures inside, so I can't really show you anything except exterior shots. It was a good experience though, I got to see a lot of baroque and empire style rooms. I should also note that the palace isn't heated, except for one or two rooms that are used by the administration. So keep that in mind if you intend on going in the winter. 

Midweek Post

I tend not to write these except when I encounter something new. Since I'm not allowed to really talk about what I do at work, those tend not to happen so much in the middle part of the week. However I thought I'd make a quick post about German recycling, since I went through the process today. Recycling in Germany plastic and glass bottles is essentially mandatory so they make it extremely easy. All you do is take all of your bottles to a local grocery store that has a collection machine, most of the big ones anyway, and put them through the hole. Then it automatically detects what size the bottle is, and gives you the deposit back on a receipt that can either be deducted from your grocery bill or given back as cash. 

Recycling collector in Edeka

The deposits can be pretty high on some types of bottles, the 1.5 liter bottles of soda I've been buying have a deposit of 25 eurocents when they cost about a euro each.

Another observation I've seen at the store here is that Germans are extremely aggressive with those plastic separators on the belt in the checkout line. The instant they put something on the belt, they put the separator behind their stuff. This is regardless of how much they're buying, I've seen many people buying a bag of chips or a can of soda putting the separators on.

Birkenkopf

Today I decided to head to the highest point in Stuttgart, a hill called Birkenkopf. The day started out cloudy, but with no rain in sight I continued on my journey.

Train coming into the station

After getting into central Stuttgart, actually traveling underneath the Birkenkopf, I then began the walk back up the hill. For those not aware, Stuttgart is situated in a particular hilly region of Germany.

Starting uphill

Eventually I reached the edge of the city and took a forest trail up the hill.

Start of the forest trail

Further Uphill

After all that, there was still a bit more to go. So I began walking up the winding path to the top of Birkenkopf.

Start of the path to the top

Sign pointing to the top

Getting close to the top

Finally though, the top was in sight and you can see the other thing Birkenkopf is known for.

Top in sight

In the wake of WW2 every German city that had been bombed was forced to deal with the issue of what to do with all of the rubble and debris that the Allied bombing campaigns had left behind. Stuttgart decided to dispose of it all on this hill, which actually raised its peak by 40 meters. Pretty much all of it is covered up, so you can't even tell walking up, but right at the top there are a few piles left exposed.

First pile of rubble you see when walking up

The plaque says "This mountain piled up after World War II from the rubble of the city stands as a memorial to the victims and a warning to the living."

There's also a cross overlooking the city in the midst of everything.

I think I was lucky to have the chance to be at the top by myself for a while. It's a very solemn atmosphere up there, especially when you remember there's 40 meters of rubble beneath you. You stand on the ruins of the old city while looking out over the rebuilt on. It was a great experience and I'm glad I took the time to walk all the way up there. 

I also thought a nice touch was the single tree planted at the top.

Broken lion facade

Eventually though it was time too leave and I started my way back down the hill. Just at the right time well, as a ton of people came up as I headed down. The only odd thing I noticed was a German family letting their kids play on the rubble piles. Pretty disrespectful in my opinion, but I moved on. 

My next destination was the center of Stuttgart to Karlsplatz, a square right in the center of the city, for another flea market. This one though is pretty much the biggest in all of Stuttgart and occurs weekly. I'm not sure for how long, but it was pretty cold today and the square was still packed. 

Karlsplatz

There was a huge selection of items compared to the others I went to, everything from vintage electronics to antique military gear to antique silver could be found here.

This time around, I actually bought a few items. Which as I've said, can be rare for me. My haul included,

Four pins from the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Olympic Pins

A 5000 Mark note from 1922. The guy had a couple of the million mark notes, but I didn't think they looked as interesting.

And finally, coat of arms for the city's of Frankfurt and Ulm

Finally to end the day, I went to to the movies. Since theaters in Germany tend to play movies dubbed in German, rather than using subtitles, I found one that plays movies in their original languages. The Corso Cinema International actually reminded me a lot of the Plaza theater in Atlanta. Not so much in aesthetic, but in atmosphere of lobby. Something different I noticed was that all of the seats had a shelf in front of them to rest drinks on. As for the movie I saw, I decided to see The Martian. I thought it was pretty good, and was just like that one part of Apollo 13 where they dump all of the parts onto the table.

Angela Merkel visits

Today was the official opening of the Bosch facility in Renningen, though technically it's been operational for almost a year at this point. To celebrate there were a couple of special guests, Angela Merkel and Winfireid Kretchmann(President of Baden Württemberg, the state Stuttgart is in). The temperature is starting to drop and today was pretty foggy, so not the happiest day for an opening.

Bosch Opening

Luckily all of the festivities were inside the main building's auditorium, which was only open for a select few. For the rest of us it was pretty much a standard work day until the Angela Merkel started her speech. It was webcast to all of the lounges around the campus, which were completely packed. I could only pick up bits and pieces of what she was talking about, though given the context of the speech it was pretty easy to guess what she would say about Bosch. After her speech was done I kind of saw her from a walkway, but she was gone shortly after.

In other news, something I do is collect vintage video games. I mentioned it in a previous post a game I got, but I also recently acquired a PAL Super Nintendo for my six months here.

SNES

While the games I have now are also available in America, there are a couple of games that were only released in the PAL region, so I'm going to see about picking up a few of them while I'm here.

Also turns out that code you see on the corner of most Nintendo cartridges actually means something. It refers to the game's serial number and the region code that refers to where the game was sold. Since I'm buying stuff in Germany, everything is marked NOE(Nintendo of Europe/Germany). So some games have language differences like my copy of StarWing

Push Start

Second Weekend: Part 2

As I said before, most things in Germany are closed on Sunday. So I decided to go to a different flea market today. This one was in Holzgerlingen, just a little bit south of where I live. I've read that charity shops, like Goodwill, are rare in Germany so flea markets happen a lot more. Actually got to ride in a diesel train on the way there, I guess the line isn't traveled enough to be electrified.

Holzgerlingen station

After arriving, I made my way into the town. While going through the town I saw someone keeps sheep in their backyard, the logical progression from keeping chickens.

Sheep, way back in the left corner.

 Eventually I reached a side street some tables were set up, and I entered the market. 

Start of the market

As it turns out though, this market was a lot bigger than the one I went to yesterday. It had to be at least twice the size in terms the number of booths. I did see one or two people that I saw yesterday, but the rest were completely new to me. 

It even had its own bier-garden and tiny merry go-round

There were some interesting booths here as well, there was a man selling FDR and DDR military stuff. I saw someone selling random lego by weight. Playmobil seems to dominate the tables of a lot of people selling vintage toys actually. I ended up not getting anything for myself this time, but I did pick up a book for one of my brothers. I don't know if they read this, so I won't say what book or which brother here.