The Nomadic Mermaid: Stuttgart

Wine Festival adorned with sunflowers

I started the weekend out going out with friends after a fantastic Indian feast prepared by Caitie. She is a vegetarian, but she kindly prepared entrees featuring meat also. The cashew chicken was my personal favorite, yum! After that, we headed up to our newly proclaimed stomping grounds of Cafe Brazil. Now if you saw this place, you would laugh. It is in the tiny town in Friedrichsdorf two train stops away from my town (all the Aussie au pairs live there). About the only German I really speak yet is this: "Eine Apfelwine, bitte." It means an apple wine, please. The other au pairs showed up by the time Caitie and I had already had a couple of drinks, but somehow Ben sped ahead of us all by the end of the night. When we went to pay, the owner gave us candy and fruit. We assumed this meant that we were by far the youngest clientele that the cafe had ever seen as most of the regulars are in their 50s watching futbol.

On Saturday morning, went left for Stuttgart. The original plan was Munich, so we were both worried that we might get bored, but Stuttgart pleasantly surprised us both. When we arrived by train on Saturday (only an hour and half from Frankfurt's central station) the town greeted us with lovely shopping streets and the fabled Black Forest peeking from over top of the city's hills.

We got checked into our hostel (my first ever, I have to admit) and roamed around the city. Luckily for us, there was a wine festival and the weather was beautiful. We found an antique festival that was really interesting. One stand sold vintage sunglasses organized by decade (starting in the 1890s). Another had old photographs of German families. I contemplated buying one, but they had sort of a "creepy" factor to them. Plenty of old things for all tastes and styles. Old military uniforms, books, jewelry, you get the picture...

The city center (Schlossplatz) is adorned with a beautiful palace complete with fountains and statues. We fell upon a modern art museum where we kept finding art that opposed something called "Stuttgart 21." Our curiosity led us to ask the curator about it and she gave us a brief background and we found out that there was a protest in the park that day. We would have been silly not to attend, so we found ourselves in the middle of a park at a peaceful protest. There was music on the stage and art hung from the trees. We found out that three people had been camping out in the park for a year and that there was a man (nick named Robin Hood) who lived up in the trees until the police kicked him out.

After so much education and protest, we felt like indulgence in the form of food and wine. We walked through a city market full of local meats, cheeses, chocolates, and breads and then found our way to the wine festival. It turned out to be so incredibly busy that we had to push through crowds of people and all the tents and tables filled up completely. If you ever go to a German festival, the crowd means that you are clearly at the right place and is a very good thing. After a few glasses of wine, Caitie and I decided to buy each other roses just because we thought we deserved them. Caitie fell head over heels with some gingerbread she bought at a stand (magen brot) and our happy selves decided to see if Stuttgart had much of a night life.

In the Schlossplatz, there were street performers (flame throwers, guitar players, etc...) We never found any clubs, but it didn't really matter because people were standing around outside everywhere on the streets in club clothes just dancing and drinking, talking and flirting. A random guy tried to convince us that he drove a dune buggy that was parked nearby. When he got in to try and drive away in it, the real owner walked up and corrected him in German (which always sounds angry no matter how you speak it). We muscled our way back through the crowds, up the hill, and to our beds in the hostel after our full and epic first day in Stuttgart.

The next day we woke up, returned briefly to the wine festival and then went to an art museum which featured Otto Dix art work. We then watched a concert in the Schlossplatz, and decided to see a movie before returning home to Frankfurt. We saw Midnight in Paris (my second time watching it). It was a beautiful film.

At the end of the weekend on the train ride home, we laughed at how we thought we would be bored in Stuttgart. Caitie and I concluded that we could never be bored anywhere together (even in a padded room in a straight jacket).

As for my plans next weekend? I'm dreaming big, and her name is "Paris." :-)