Saturday, December 27th we started the day in Stuttgart, with lots of snow! We hadn’t seen any snow (besides what’s on the mountain peaks) since we left Minnesota, so we were excited. Little did we know that it would go on to snow for the next four days we were in Germany.
Our hotel in Stuttgart was a few miles from the city center in a more industrial part of the city. After we got packed up, we took an S-Bahn back to the main train station. As we rode along, what we saw of the city looked very modern, with office buildings and factories that wouldn’t look our of place in the US.
Stuttgart is the headquarters of both Mercedes-Benz and Porsche. Both companies are supposed to have nice museums there, and we even rode right past the stop for the Porsche museum. We thought about visiting one or both, but we didn’t think we had enough time. Instead, once we got to the main train station we walked to the Schlossplatz park. There were some older buildings to see, and a statue of Christoph of Wurttemberg with a four panel picture story of his life. He looked like a good angry German in all the pictures.
When we got to the park we remembered we hadn’t had our morning coffee yet, so I found a shop in the Christmas market area to order some. I accidentally started speaking French to the cashier, and then I accidentally bought two coffee mugs from her due to my language difficulty. In hindsight it was a good purchase because the coffee mugs are the only souvenirs we have from our trip.
After the park, we left Stuttgart and boarded a train to Ulm, Germany to see the world’s tallest church. The steeple measures 530 ft according to Wikipedia. It was snowing pretty heavily when we arrived, and made an interesting sight to see the church looming over the city through the snow. We walked through a pedestrian only street with shops and slowly neared the church. Up close the steeple looks almost like lace with its incredible attention to detail. We looked for the entrance out front, and only one of the giant, heavy carved doors opened. The door opened to a perplexing tiny, wood paneled entrance room. After stepping across the five foot chamber, we opened the interior door and the ceiling exploded to its full height. The history of the church is interesting too, it was begun in 1377 but not finished until 1890. The city converted it to a Lutheran church in 1531, and it barely survived the bombings of World War Two.
For lunch we had bratwursts from a food truck in Ulm, then we boarded a train to Munich. We checked into our hotel and decided to check out a famous beer hall called Hofbrauhaus for dinner. It was a little hard to find in Munich’s winding streets. When we arrived we walked into a large room with bench seats and large tables. It was packed, and no one greeted us at the door. People kept walking in and out so eventually we figured we were supposed to seat ourselves. It took us a while to find room at a table with strangers. Once we had our seats we didn’t feel so out of place, a waiter came, and we were able to figure out how to order beer and food. Like all the food and beer in Germany it was good.
After dinner we saw a different part of the city, because we started walking the wrong way. We eventually found an S-bahn station and went back to the hotel to plan our next day and sleep.
