When I last left off, I was standing on a platform at Amsterdam Centraal station, waiting for a train to Arnhem. This was going to be the first in a series of three trains that day to get me to Stuttgart.
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Amsterdam to Arnhem lasted about an hour. Then after standing around Arnhem's platform a little while, I boarded the second train, from Arnhem to Düsseldorf. This one was a regional train operated by a German company, and this is where I first discovered that mask mandates were still a thing in Germany. Hardly anyone in the Netherlands or Germany was wearing masks anymore, but in Germany they were still required on intercity trains and public transit, and I was politely reminded to wear mine on the Arnhem-Düsseldorf train.
During the train rides I cracked open Sapiens, the book I bought in Austin's airport. I only read the first chapter, since my daily jet lag nap eventually set in, but I liked what I read so far. The book is a sweeping history of the human race, starting at the very beginning at the emergence of the Homo genus. The book is full of explanations, from history, of why we are the way we are, mostly stemming from what Harari terms "revolutions" like the Cognitive Revolution, in which Homo sapiens' brains grew and became capable of complex thought, and the Agricultural Revolution, when we mostly stopped being hunter-gatherers and became settled farmers. I don't want to turn this travelogue into a book review so I'll stop there and say I liked this book and highly recommend it to anyone who found the little bit I wrote here was interesting.
While passing through the station in Wesel, I noticed a Ruhr Area S-Bahn, a nice little reminder of one of my last trips when I still lived in Germany.
The second train ride lasted about two hours. Afternoon was fading into evening as I waited for my third train in the Düsseldorf station.
Almost there! Just one more train ride...
The third and last train of the day was also the longest, two hours and 45 minutes, on a high-speed ICE train. It was during this ride I started to drift off to sleep, the first of many times this week I would fall asleep in the late afternoon or early evening, a sign that I hadn't entirely avoided jet lag. But when I wasn't dozing off, I recognized all the familiar stops, like Frankfurt and Mannheim, that I always rolled through on trains during trips back then.
Finally at 7:30 pm the train pulled into Stuttgart's perpetually-under-construction train station.
I see Stuttgart 21 is still gradually progressing, and still way behind schedule, if there still even is a schedule to be behind. Since you most likely don't know what Stuttgart 21 is: it's the plan to completely replace the central train station with a new underground station with the tracks running in an entirely different direction. It started sometime in the mid-2010s, is taking far longer than expected, and has gone extremely overbudget. Since I moved away, they've removed even more of the old station so that the old train hall, the big building taking up the right side of this photo, isn't even used anymore; I had to walk from my train through a building on the side to get here and see this view. Two years ago, I would've walked on an enclosed temporary bridge, over the construction, from the train to the hall.
Before going anywhere else, I had to walk down Königstraße a little bit and take a look at Schlossplatz for the first time in almost a year and a half. There certainly are a lot more people here than when I last looked! That's probably because the last time I was here, it was not only winter, but also the middle of a pandemic lockdown. The pandemic may not be completely over, but it sure looks like the worst of it is.
The next thing I wanted to do was check into the hostel where I'd reserved a couple nights, Alex 30. This place was named after its address, Alexanderstraße 30. This place was pretty close to downtown and was a short ride away on the light rail--the U-Bahn--since it was just down the street from the Olgaeck station. So I easily reached the place, checked in and got my room key, impressing the clerk that I could speak any level of German at all. I couldn't just leave my luggage and step back outside, though; I was still covered in a thin greasy film due to having sweated so much walking around Austin the morning before, and so finally got to take a long-awaited hot shower.
Back out in the city, I didn't want to stay out too long since I hadn't had a good night's sleep the night before on the plane. After some wandering around I found a place called Ribingurumu where I had a couple good beers.
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
Alex 30 did have breakfast, but you had to reserve it ahead of time to eat there, so I rode an U-Bahn back to the Hauptbahnhof and got one kind of sandwich or another at Kamps.
I didn't have much of a plan for the day, so first I decided I wanted to walk in Wilhelma Park. Two years earlier, during the first months of pandemic lockdown when I had a lot of time off from work, I used to take long bike rides on weekday mornings which often brought me to that park. Specifically I wanted to find a certain long stretch of pavement that was lined by trees. I'd always thought it really photogenic, and wanted to take a great photo of it.
Unfortunately, I never found this tree-lined path. I saw a lot that was familiar, but not that area, no matter how many circles I walked around in. Looking at Google Maps now, I can see that this was because I had been walking around Wilhelma Park and the path I was looking for was in neighboring Unter Schlossgarten.
Back on Königstraße in the city center, I stopped at a coffee place I'd seen so many times when I lived here, both downtown and in my old neighborhood: Coffreez. It sells only iced and blended coffee drinks. For the first time I actually stopped here and bought something, a small frozen cappuccino. I really liked it, and I think I'll be stopping at more Coffreez locations on future trips to Germany.
After that tasty blended cappuccino, I wanted to check out the museum I knew was inside the castle we saw in that last photo from the night before. But I soon learned three important things: there are actually two castles, of which the one in the photo that I'd always known about was the newest, the museum within only admits people who have reservations, and so isn't visited much by people who aren't researchers, and finally the old castle, which I'd never actually knowingly seen, has its own museum which is open to the public. The old castle was just across a street from the new one.
This is the courtyard in the middle of the old castle. Apparently I'd walked past this building who knows how many times, without realizing it, during the years I lived in this city. The castle included its own church, the entrances to which are on that tower in the center of the photo.
The Old Castle has a museum in it, focusing on something like 3,000 years of history of the local area. It didn't impress me much. I think I've just been through so many museums in the last few years I'm just feeling over most collections of artifacts behind glass, and so I only spent about an hour in this one. There were a few things that stood out, though.
There was a hall in the basement all about both timekeeping and navigation. Plenty of antique clocks, sextants, and astrolabes from various centuries.
Here's an old map of Stuttgart from...I'm not too sure, the 1700s? I've compared this to Google Maps satellite view. The castle which houses this museum is numbered 1 on the map (Altes Schloss) and the park you see under that is still around, called Karlsplatz. Building 5 (Gesandtenhaus/Prinzenbau) I'm not sure if it's still there, because it doesn't look like the building on the spot today, Altes Kanzlei, but the open square between it and the old castle is Schillerplatz, where I would have lunch that day. You can see a big church to the left of Schillerplatz; that's Stiftkirche and is still there today. Buildings 3 and 4 no longer stand, as that's where Schlossplatz is. The moat surrounding the city center is also long gone, having been replaced by streets including Königstraße.
Outside the museum I found a nice outdoor restaurant in the aforementioned Schillerplatz. They had something on the menu which was my favorite local food when I lived here: Maultaschen! If you've never heard of Maultaschen, it's been a Swabian staple for centuries, and it's kind of like a German twist on ravioli. Each piece consists of some kind of ground meat--it could be beef, pork, chicken, veal, anything really--with diced onions, spinach, and various spices. It comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes depending on who made it. At restaurants, at least those like this one that I've eaten at, it's usually served as a "soup" with two Maultaschen sitting in a small amount of broth. I used to eat this quite often, since I could buy it at the Kaufland I lived down the street from, but this time at this restaurant was the first I'd had it since I left Germany over a year earlier. To drink with this, I had a half-liter of Stuttgarter Hofbräu Kellerbier.
After lunch I knew where I had to go next, the TV Tower. South of the city center in the Degerloch neighborhood, there is a TV tower with an observation deck, like so many other cities in the world. For the whole two years and change that I lived in this city, I'd gotten so close to this tower, I had often biked and run there, in fact it was one of the first places I visted after moving, but kept procrastinating on actually entering the tower and taking in the view from the observation deck. Now, it was finally time to correct that error.
Running from my apartment to right here and back was about 10 miles.
We're looking straight north at downtown Stuttgart. It's hard to see here, because it's so far, but the New Castle is right in the center of this photo and the train station is just above it and to the right.
Here we are looking southwest and can see the Möhringen neighborhood off in the distance. That cluster of buildings in the center is called SI-Zentrum. That's something else I used to often run past.
Now on the opposite side of the tower, we're looking northeast toward wine country. That tower in the foreground is another TV tower, Fernmeldturm, and past that you can see the Obertürkheim neighborhood. Out of the picture, to the right, is where the city of Esslingen is.
You can also go up a level and get another view from there. Looking down from the upper level, closer to the tower and not as far off, you can see an U-Bahn light rail train leaving the Ruhbank (Fernsehturm) station.
There's also a café at the top of the tower, where I got myself a coffee. It was around this time that my jet lag drowsiness was starting to hit me, so I needed the caffeine injection.
After the TV Tower, there was one more stop for the day: my old neighborhood Vaihingen. Here I would be meeting one of my work friends at the Irish pub I used to live down the street from. This was the pub I used to sometimes walk to on weekends for a few pints and occasionally an Irish coffee. And after all this time, the owner still recognized me! Then I just realized, the second pandemic lockdowns, in the fall of 2020, happened so unexpectedly that I never had a chance to stop by the pub and say "this is my last time here, I'm about to move."
After the reunion accompanied by beer and dinner--a Cajun chicken wrap, last thing I expected to find at an Irish pub in Germany--at the pub, I walked around the lovely streets of Vaihingen as the sun set. I passed by Freibad Rosental, the outdoor pool where I used to swim laps in the summers. This time I couldn't go swimming, as my swimsuit was back at the hostel and the pool was closing for the night anyway, but it was still nice to see the place and smell the chlorine in the air. The place was only a short walk from my old apartment, which is where I went next. Of course all I could do there was just stand next to the building and nostalgically look at it. I don't live here anymore, so there was nothing left but to walk back to the train station and go back to the hostel.
The next morning I'd be leaving the city on a train. Munich awaited...
But before we leave Stuttgart behind, there's a couple more photos to look at. Remember how, traveling all over the German-speaking world, I took all these pictures of examples of local dialects? On this trip I collected some more. Schwaben-Bräu is still making ads with Schwäbisch phrases, as you can see...
Stuttgart/Munich Trip:
- From Austin to Amsterdam
- Revisiting Stuttgart in 2022
- First Day in Munich
- Finishing the Munich Visit, and a Night in Frankfurt
- Deutsches Museum
