Second Week of November

Well, time for the weekly update on my goings on here in Stuttgart. Work at Bosch is still going good, especially now that it's starting to get a bit busier for me. I've been assigned to help a few different projects in the division that I work for. It's good since I like to see what all of these projects do, especially one involving batteries that I'm in now.

Some people have asked me if anything is going on here in light of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. While I didn't see much personally, French intitutes around Germany have had flowers stacked up oustide their doors. The Germans stand with France and it is tragic what occurred in Paris.

I had a bit of a slow weekend, but as always I started Saturday bright and early. What was actually surprising is that it was nice and sunny all day for a change, and warm to boot. The temperature here hasn't really gotten below 50 during the day, and even at night it's not freezing quite yet. I'm still waiting on the temperature to drop but I have been informed that this part of Germany has a much more moderate climate than the rest of the country.

As always I started Saturday visiting the flea market at Karlsplatz. There was a new addition to the square, a large building that had been put up since last week. I assume it's for the upcoming Christmas market, but there weren't any signs on it to say what it was for.

Flea market at Karlsplatz

This weekend was actually pretty successful in terms my haul from the market. I acquired two more "cigarette books", one for the 1932 Olmpyics and one for famous historical figures. I'm finding that there's a huge variety of these cigarette books, everything from art history to the first world war. The other items were two ELO Singles and a book on the Battle of Narvik.

Cigarette Books

Top text says, "On the eve of the World War"

ELO Singles

I did try to find other bands, but these are two of my favorite ELO songs.

Book on battle of Narvik, Norway

So as you can see the book on the Battle of Narvik is written from the Axis perspective. I had a friend ask why I buy stuff like this, and the reason is that I simply like to collect things. I already own a variety of items from WW2 from the Allied perspective, books and newsreels mainly, so it's interesting to see the same essentially the same kind of stuff, but written from the other side.

I've also been doing a bit of 16mm film collecting while here. Nothing too major since I don't really have the ability to watch any films here, but just to take advantage of the fact that a lot of stuff on German Ebay doesn't ship outside the country. So far I've gotten a few things like an episode of the Twilight Zone(Time Enough at Last) and a German WW2 newsreel on the Battle of Crete. The later actually comes on a cardboard reel, which I would assume would be because metal was too expensive at the time.

As for the rest of my Saturday, I headed over to the Linden Museum. It's a museum that focuses on cultural artifacts from around the world, with recreations of scenes from their countries of origin thrown in here and there. I didn't take any pictures inside, but I can say museum has a very impressive collection of artifacts from different regions around the world. I particularly liked their Africa collection. The China collection was also interesting to see, especially as I recently watched "The Last Emperor".

Linden Museum

Sunday was a bit slower, I decided just to sleep in and skip going to a museum or something. I did however decide to go to the new James Bond movie. I thought it was pretty good for the most part. I'd heard some people complain that Christoph Waltz wasn't in it enough, but I personally thought it fit the overall theme of the film, and one scene in particular just exemplifies Waltz's ability to be creepy and foreboding. I won't elaborate, but suffice it to say it's not anyone who would consider themselves squeamish.

Train station in the evening

Corso theater