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.