Herrenberg, Stuttgart, B-W as a whole

hi! this one is gonna be long, soo, only read further if you have time, or if you need to avoid doing things you need to do!

Ok, so last Friday, I went on a hiking trip to Brocken with Karen, and then, Saturday morning, left for Stuttgart! On Saturday, I hung out with charlotte and a bunch of her friends at Wasen, which is Stuttgart's Oktoberfest. We hung out and played quite a bit, and I crashed at Charlotte’s house that night.
Sunday: took the very short trip to Herrenberg, was met at the train station by Jörg and Marianne, and then we went on a hike near Tübingen to the top of a little hill with a restaurant on top, so we sat down for lunch, and enjoyed the sunlight. We then went back to Herrenberg, where we toured the town, and I took lots of pics. Later on, went back to their house, where we met up with Lena and Julian, and Lena’s boyfriend Mauri. (sp?) The following day was Mauri’s first day of university, so we hung out, played games, and went to bed relatively early.
Monday: Julian headed off on a week-long trip to Tarare, France very early in the morning, and everyone else had work/school, so I explored Herrenberg, took some more pictures, and attempted not to get lost. I was actually surprised by how familiar everything looked, even after 13 years, I could find my way around ok! Things have changed a lot, lots of new buildings, the town has expanded greatly, and there are new roads and trains and buildings everywhere. I then went back to my old school and took some pics, and generally re-lived my childhood.
Tuesday: After Marianne got back from work, we made a quick trip out to the Hohenzollern castle that is abt 30 mins away from Herrenberg. Its this amazing castle on top of a cone mountain in the middle of a valley, and just completely badass. The family that built it in the 1400’s still owns it, and the prince still hosts parties there on a regular basis (note to self, somehow get an invite) We had to put on wool slipper things so we wouldn’t track dirt around that castle or scratch the floors or whatever, so I spent most of my time gawking and sliding around the rooms like a kid on rollerskates.
Weds: Spent the day touristing around Stuttgart by myself, which was great! I started off going to the Daimler-Benz museum… for 4 hours… its an amazing building- no straight lines or corners anywhere. The architect designed it to look like a double helix, and its gorgeous. But what it contains is even better. I think I might’ve suffered a bit from dehydration because of all of the drooling I was doing. (see pics) I then made my way out to the fernsehturm, which is a huge TV tower on the outskirts of Stuttgart with a skyview platform, and a little café way up top. It was really windy and freaking cold, and unfortunately cloudy, so the pics I took don’t really show a great view of Stuttgart, but they’re still fun. Took lots of pictures, ate in the café, and generally enjoyed myself for a bit. Then, headed downtown, took pictures of the old city, and wandered around until I found a real döner shop, at which I paid only 2 euros (!!) and got a huge greasy/creamy concoction just like I remember from my childhood. Not like the weird little ones up here with currysauce (although they’re still good). After that, I went to the markthalle, which is a huge indoor marketplace. I bought everything I needed to make dinner that night, and ended up spending abt 2 hours wandering around and trying things. The stall owners were all really nice and helpful, and surprised that: a) I knew what I was doing in the market b) I'm American (they usually guessed Swedish after I talked, must be the tall blond thing). After that, I met up with Charlotte to take some more pics for Dave and Ivanka, and then headed back to Herrenberg, laden with my supplies. When I got back, the Marstallers were just beginning to get home, so I whipped up some butternut squash risotto (meghan’s recipe) and we had a nice dinner.
Thurs: Slept in a little, and then called Charlotte to meet up in her hometown. Her mom drove us (charlotte, her older sister, and myself) out to the Ritter Sport museum. For those of you not in the know, ritter sport is amazing chocolate. Go find yourself some. So, toured the museum, played with all the stuff oriented to the kids (free chocolate machine, duh!) and then went to the shop. Lets just say I put a big ole’ dent in my supposed plan to save a little cash. I bought about 10 kilos of chocolate (at a discount, of course) (and half of it was for the marstallers anyway, don’t judge!) and some other fun stuff. Then we went to the café, and had some cake and hot chocolate, which consisted of hot milk with a bar of ritter sport in it. Basically, I was in heaven (diabetic hell) for the entire day. After that, we swung by patch barracks, and I took a quick pic out front, for old time’s sake. As we were parked out front, a bunch of school busses started rolling in with decidedly American-looking kids. I'm glad my dad decided to send us to German schools.
Fri: Woke up early, got on the train to Ulm! It’s a little city (abt göttingen’s size) on the very east coast of B-W, right on the Donau river. It is famous for being the hometown of Hugo Boss, and for having the highest church tower in the world… which you can climb… which I did. It’s 181.53 meters tall, and consisted of me dragging my ass up 768 steps. I had met up with the Marstallers cousin/niece Judith, who is studying medicine at the university there, and she showed me around. It was actually her first time climbing up to the top of the tower too. The climb itself was tiring, me hating to do anything involving physical activity and all, but the architecture and the views were amazing. After we got to the top (lots and lots of windy stairs) we posed for pics, squeezed around the other people up top, and attempted to make our way back down. For most of the way, there are separate stairs for up and down, but not at the very top or the very bottom. We had chosen an opportune time to leave, as half of Germany’s schoolchildren were arriving at the cathedral, and making their way to the top. Not fun. Lets leave it at that. Judith took me to lunch at a bread place (yum), and then had to go to class, so I wandered around, took pictures of the old city, and went to a museum in the area. Lots of modern art (meh). A couple pretty cool 3D works, and some cool mechanical sculptures tho! After that, met up with Judith again, and met one of her best friends, and headed off to ikea! I needed to find a support beam for my schrank, and Judith needed a new plant/ wanted to goof around in ikea. We spent way too long goofing around the various displays in ikea and teaching me new words in German, most of them not repeatable on a pg13 blog, except knutschkugel, which is what they call little tiny round cars. It means makeout ball, basically. We bought my thing, and Judith got her plant, an Australian chestnut, which she promptly named hugo. We quickly discovered the hugo had 3 nuts, one of which had mold growing on it, and that hugo smelled bad. After that, went to a creperie for dinner, met up with more of judith’s friends, and generally had a really good time hanging out with people my own age. Headed back to Stuttgart after drinking and eating way too much, and got home at midnight.
Sat: Was our lazy day. Lena was busy working on math studying, but the rest of us got to play around. Marianne had to do a science experiment with her class, and was doing test-runs. She was attempting to take the chlorophyll out of leaves, and separate them by color (often called chromatography). We tried freaking everything to get the colors with absolutely no success. We boiled, ground, blended, mashed, and did all sorts of other unspeakable acts to these leaves to try to get them to separate. No dice. We decided we had the wrong kind of alcohol. (they call it all spiritus there, no ethanol/ethyl/ether differentiation) so we decided to try it again later, with different kinds. For lunch, I made some spätzle and goulash. Marstallers have both a press, which I have used, and a board, which I haven't. Jörg showed me how to use the spätzle board and I wasn’t too terrible at it, actually! I was quite proud of myself. We sat down to a nice lunch (btw, its so nice to cook in an already-established kitchen!!) After lunch, we went to the high school, where the upperclassmen were having a fair. Lena and the choir were singing there, so we went to watch her. She sang two songs, backed up by the choir, and it was lovely. Their performance was followed by kids doing strange things to strange music. Apparently some form of Brazilian martial art/mind control/creative outlet for those of us that are deaf. My head and my ass were both numb after that experience. Later on that evening, I went with Jörg to my very first handball game. It’s a really fun game, a combo of football, soccer, rugby, and WWF. Needless to say, I enjoyed it, but will definitely be staying on the spectator side, lest I get broken in half. It was regional league, so most of the players on our team are born and bred in Herrenberg, and one of the guys was actually in my grade in the grade school, which was cool.
Sun: Marianne and Jörg and I (Lena was still studying) headed off to Heidelberg, which is in the northwest region of the state. It is an old university town, where lots of famous people studied (Goethe being one of them). Its absolutely gorgeous, huge old redstone castle on the hill, renaissance buildings still in existence, cobblestone streets, the whole 9 yards. We went around the castle, went into the basement, where they have GIANT kegs, used to store water during times of war (from the 17 and 1800s). Took the requisite pictures, natürlich. Then we headed out onto the terrace garden, which is HUGE. It offered great views of the city, so took more pictures, and during our wanders, Marianne found some giant leaves that none of us could identify, or find the tree from which we came. Being a dutiful teacher, she carried a few of them along to show her kids. We sat down for lunch in a restaurant that is more than 300 years old- an old student hangout, full of writing on walls, carving in tables, and student history. The food was typical schwäbisch, and amazing. After that, we toured more of the city, saw the river, went to Marstall Straβe, and found a käthe wolfahrt. Uugh. We also picked up some student kisses, which are an historic confection made since the 1600’s. it was named after the son of a chocolatier who presented his invented chocolate “kiss” to the girl he loved, and they continued to make them. The family that started the tradition still runs the chocolate shop… pretty cool! We then headed over to the university library, which houses the Manesse manuscript. For those of you who don’t know what that is, ask Resler, or google it. I took a picture of the copy of it (made in 1700’s) because the actual one is like 1200 years old, and is encased in a vault. There was also a kafka display up (he studied in Heidelberg too) and a bunch of his original manuscripts were on display, as well as some of his early critique work for the student newspaper. They also had samples of illuminated books from the middle ages up, so spent some time going through that as well. Then, headed back to Herrenberg. (Freudian slip, I had actually written “headed back home,” but figured that’d be confusing)
Monday, we finally succeeded in getting the chlorophyll to separate out (YAY!) I made some saltimbocca for lunch (yum) and started packing to head home. (göttingen)
Tuesday, met up with charlotte one last time, got some lunch, got some icecream, met up with one of her friends, and then hopped on the train back here!!

Congrats, you’ve made it through my novel. I'm terribly sorry.