Stuttgart
Sat, 12 May, 2001. 1. Stuttgart
City Centre
Sat, 19 May, 2001. 2. Stuttgart
Television Tower
Sat, 26 May, 2001. 3. Tubingen
Sun, 27 May, 2001. 4. Mercedez
Benz Museum
Sun, 27 May, 2001. 5. Porsche
Museum
Sat, 2 June, 2001. 1. BMW
Museum
Sat, 2 June, 2001 2. Munich
City Centre
Sun, 3 June, 2001 3. Dachau
War Memorial
Sun, 3 June, 2001 4. Residenz
Museum
Saturday, 9 June, 2001. Strasbourg (France)
Thursday, 14 June, 2001. Hiedelberg
As the name says, it is the City Centre! The centre avenue is tree-lined. No vehicle traffic. Shops on either side - both shopping chains (e.g. Kaufhoff), and branded showrooms (e.g. Benetton). A couple of U-bahn (Railway) Stations are in the area, besides the Hauptbanhof (Main Station). The last is where all the long distance trains originate.
The City Centre is always crowded. It is a nice experience just to walk around. You also find people either singing, or playing some instrument (dignified way of soliciting money).
I visited this place, quite often. Food is not a problem here, with a Mac outlet on the main street. I was also introduced to a Chinese joint, where I found good vegetarian food.
This is way off the City Centre. I don't remember the exact access route, but I happened to take the bus from Pleningen, where my friend stayed.
The tower is a 150m tall structure, atop which is located a restaurant. What's the point in having a tower if you can't climb up! Well! in this case, you don't climb, but take the lift. There is an entry charge of DM5, of course, and the lift takes about 30 seconds to reach the top!
The view from the top of the tower is breathtaking. Stuttgart looks green all around, when viewed from there. Winds are realy chilly up there, as well! We found quite a lot of tourists and sight-seers in the place.
This visit also took me to a lovely Chinese restaurant in Pleningen (China Town). The food is terrific, if costly!
Tubingen is a small town, about 30 km from Stuttgart. You take local trains to reach the place. The town looks pretty inconspicuous, and a short walk takes you to the local tourist office (the only place where you are guaranteed to get an English speaker)!
I bought a local map (of places to see) for DM 3, and set off exploring. Tubingen houses one of the oldest Universities in the area. The old town is well preserved, with its Churches, narrow alleys, fountains, old buildings, and structures. All "must-see" places were marked on the map, and it was just a question of walking around, and spotting the places.
When it was lunch time, I took the opportunity to visit the local Indian restaurant, The Delhi Durbar. It had a lunch buffet (on weekends) DM 19.50 - unlimited roti, rice and side dishes. Thee food tasted delicious, it being my first "Indian meal" on German soil (excluding self-cooking, and food at friends' places!).
It takes about 4 hours to cover the places to see, including a walk through a beautiful tree-lined corridor (the trees being 200 years old), and a visit to the Palace.
This is located close to the City Centre. You take the S1 bahn and get off Gattrib-Benz Stadion (or some such station). It's a short walk to the "pick-up" point, where a bus from the Museum picks you up.
It's a 5 minute ride to the Museum gate. The entry is free. You're given something which resembles a remote control, which is for the audio guide. At each exhibit (marked by a number), you press the number keys on the remote, to hear an explanation of the exhibit.
The Museum is superb and houses all the important and interesting models of the cars built by Daimler and Benz. You also get to know that these two were two different people, and later combined to form a single company. Stuttgart is the home of Daimler. You also learn the origin of the famous "Mercedez" brand. Mercedez was the daughter of one of Daimler's sales agent!
This is located on the "other side". You take the S6 train for this. I forget the stop, but "Porsche" board on the large building is clearly visible. A short walk brings you to the "Museum" which is nothing but a large room, which houses about 15 cars. It is no comparison to Mercedez Benz Museum, but visitable for "completeness" sake. I also got to know of Le Mann 24 hour rally here - which is where Porsche cars came good.
A 3 day weekend was coming up. What better thing to do than check out the whereabouts of my cousin Vinay and what he was upto these days? Got an ally in Prakash, the husband of another cousin, who happened to be here too.
Thus it was that the 3 of us met at FerdKirchen Railway Station at a quarter to eleven, on Saturday, 2nd June, 2001.
Vinay promised us a lovely Indian lunch (in a restaurant, of course) and we took a couple of trains to this joint, "Taj Mahal". Well! we were greeted by a noxious odour, accentuated by the presence of this Chinese waiter, who spoke only German. We gathered that it was an "off-day" for Indian food!
Sensing the rising wrath that was manifesting itself in me and Prakash, Vinay gathered the whereabouts of another Indian restaurant. A train ride and a 10 minute walk later, it was I who spotted that place, in a road totally different from where we were walking!
Anyway, the lovely food made up for the troubles and we were underway on the sightseeing leg.
Not sure what made us decide that BMW Museum was *the* place to go. Go, we did and paid the DM5.5 entry fee - but discovered hardly anything worth the price. The audio stuff were either not working or fixed to the wall, the video shows were ridiculous, and the models on exhibit weren't anything great!
This was the third car museum I was visiting - following the Mercedez Benz and Porsche Museums the previous weekend, and I was hard-pressed to rank BMW in the second place!
Did I say the weather was cool (about 10 degrees) and there was wind and drizzle. The umbrella I'd bought the other day, came of good use!
We were back in the City Square (or whatever you called it) and in time to watch the "popular" clock chime 5 PM. So what's great about it, you may ask? Well! we'd some puppets coming out, dancing, fighting and doing various things (not unlike the stuff in the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, but for considerably longer time).
A hot cappuccino warmed our hearts and body as drizzles continued. All we could do was window shopping, if for no other reason than that all shops closed at 4 PM on Sat, and full time on Sunday!
Once we were through with it, Vinay suggested a trip to English Garden. Well! besides being a very large garden, it was also popular for its Beer Garden (a hah!).
Another couple of train rides later, we emerged into this Street. We could sense something was different seeing the kind of crowd gathered there. A band was performing in a corner. Men and women were clad (or unclad) in strange attire, besides sporting the wierdest of hairdos, nosedos, and whatever other dos and don'ts. Many were yelling incoherently, a few breaking beer bottles, most of them too stoned to be aware of what was happening.
A large posse of policefolks kept a wary eye on them. We decided that discretion was the better part of valour and beat a retreat.
Considering that we needed to survive a couple of days in Munich, we did a shopping of the essentials (food, of course, what else!). Shops in Railway Stations are exceptions to the aforementioned weekend rules.
Back we were to our "pension" - me and Prakash had the luxury of a 5 bed pension all to ourselves - fully furnished and having all that you asked for - save, English TV channels!
Vinay and his friends then treated us to a spectacular dinner.
Braving the now-familiar weather, we set out to show Vinay, Dachau - famous for its Concentration Camp for Jews during World War II. We were fortunate to get a booklet in English in the Indian restaurant the previous day, which had excellent description on places to see and how to get there.
The Dachau Memorial was pretty morbid and disturbing. Though most of the original buildings were no longer there, the reconstructed memorial was good (or bad) enough to give some idea of life and times there, during that time. The photo exhibition gave a good picture of the sequence of events, the participants and horrific details of various activites which went on there!
We never realised the passage of time, and it was 2 PM, when we began the return journey. We decided to skip lunch so that we could visit "Residence Museum"..
The entry fee of DM14 was worth very pfenning - so spectacular were the exhibits. Since no words can adequately describe it, I'm not giving any!
Suffice to say, we were done by 6 PM and looked forward to dinner. We decided to check out another Indian restaurant. Not sure whether it was the nose, but we unerringly discovered our destination and were subject to another fantastic dinner - this time, a paid one!
We had a lazy beginning to our last day of stay and only had time to go to the famous FeldKirchen Lake (famous because of my cousin's presence:)
In the short time we spent there, Vinay also managed to introduce us to 3 cops (or was it the other way around)? Luckily we had our passports in hand. Also, it appeared as though the policewoman couldn't figure out where our visas were. In any case, we weren't offered a chance to be the guest of the German Government - you know what I mean!
It was inevitable that we go back to the Indian Restaurant for lunch
- before we left to catch our trains back.