I am really behind on these blogs, so I’ll be trying to catch up in the next week. We have been really busy, so much has happened and that is partly the reason why I’m behind. (bet no one else is having that problem, hehe).
The Medieval castle that is the center of the town of Tübingen, sits atop a hill. And much of the rest of the town is on hilly terrain, something that I noticed as I had to walk up and down those hills. Bikes are real popular here as a form of transportation, but to me all those hills make the bikes somewhat less than useful, but they sure seem to work for the locals. Thinking about this lead me to the thought, I wonder if all the cities in Germany are as hilly as this one. I found out this week.
For me the highlight of the second week here was our outing to Stuttgart. I flew into Stuttgart, but really all I saw was the airport and autobahn, nothing else. We went there by train which is how people get almost everywhere in Germany. There are no high speed trains between here and Stuttgart, so we took a slower commuter train. It made a lot of stops but the ride was smooth as silk. And one of the big advantages to taking the train, is that you can study or talk or read while you get where you are going. It beats the heck out of driving as far as I’m concerned. Here is the train station that we left from in Tübingen:

Here is the main train station in Stuttgart where we arrived:

This is Koenigsstrasse it is a long flat wide street that is for pedestrian traffic only, with shops and café’s on both sides. The street must be over a mile long and is where the real upscale shopping is. And this street is flat, as most of the old downtown part of Stuttgart is. So not all German cities are as hilly as Tübingen is.

This is the “New” Schloss or New Palace. In an earlier blog I mentioned the fact that the term new, doesn’t mean the same thing her as it does in the US. This palace was built originally about the same time that our country was founded, but it is the new one because there is an old one from the middle ages, which is now a museum. In general, however, new seems to mean anything built after the Second World War. When the Germans talk about new buildings this is usually what they mean.