Stuttgart

I visited Stuttgart three years ago at about the same time of year. This time around we waited until the last day of our stay to go into the city because the Wine Festival started that day. While we did eventually spend a wonderful evening in the city center eating Maultaschen and chatting friends of our host, we had an entire afternoon to explore the city before everyone was off work.

 Later in the afternoon, Anne met us and took is to a part of Stuttgart that I had never visited. Killesburg has a huge park with gardens and popular apartment complexes. We climbed a stainless steel tower and enjoyed the view over Bad Cannstadt and downtown.

We wandered around downtown, through the still empty wine festival and to my favorite toy store. We must have waited too long to find lunch, because we kept finding ourselves wandering past food in the Markthalle and on side streets. Yum…

 We started at the Hauptbahnhof, where the construction that was just scratching the surface three years ago was now burrowed deep into the ground. The Stuttgart 21 exhibit in he main train station's tower shows visitors what is there (a terminal station) and what is being built. The new through station will be almost completely underground and streamline train traffic through the city. To us, it was a super cool construction site that we had to walk over any time we wanted to go somewhere by train.