Some Stuttgart Sites

Stuttgart is home to both Porsche and Mercedez-Benz, so naturally they have fancy museums to show off the cars' histories and of course for car enthusiasts to admire the various car models. I didn't really care which museum we went to, but somehow we decided to visit the Porsche Museum. It was fun to see all of the different cars through the years, even though you needed to ignore all the bragging conveyed in the audio tour.

Nate just thought this Carrera GT looked nice (and likely dangerous if he ever got behind the wheel):


One of the many winning racecars on display:


The museum even had a Porsche Diesel tractor from the 1950's. It could go a whopping 20 km/hr!


Stuttgart has a very large and lovely popular park right next to the central train station. We decided on an afternoon stroll through the park and were surprised to see hundreds and hundreds of signs protesting "Stuttgart 21." We spent most of our walk wondering what Stuttgart 21 was, and made some fairly good guesses. It is obviously a huge issue in the area with very strong opinions on both sides. There have been many protests where police force was required. We still don't understand the arguments that well, but basically the government plans on spending many billions of Euros to expand the train station to make it ultra modern in hopes of making Stuttgart a huge European hub as far as trains go. Build something big and the trains will come I suppose. Besides the crazy price tag, the park we were strolling in would be destroyed as a side-effect of the plan. So the anti-Stuttgart 21 enthusiasts have every tree numbered and most trees have been decorated with stuffed animals. There is a tent village in the park where some avid protesters will live until March when construction begins. Some of the tallest trees even had tree houses about 50 feet about ground with tents, that required special cords for the occupants to be brought up and down (rapeling style, I would assume). It was all very interesting for us to observe.


We didn't get any great pictures of the tent village or tree decorations, but in the background of this picture you can see a tree house high up and a couple of tents where some protesters live.


Further along in the park (in a part that will not be affected by the building plans), we saw lots of old men playing bocce ball in a big bocce court. The old men were obviously really good at the game and had precise throws. Next to the bocce court were 2 life-size chessboards. It looked like an entertaining way to spend an afternoon.


This park was very picturesque: