This first full week was an eventful one, so you’ll have to keep up. Starting where I left off…on Wednesday…
Wednesday we went out to a club, as Thursday was a national holiday here in Germany. We went to a place named TONSTUDIO. It was pretty darn sweet, as Matt and I had never been to a European club before, we didn’t know what to expect. It didn’t disappoint. It was the night of a ‘Neon-Party’ so they had prizes for the best neon outfits, and they were handing out neon at the door. Be sure to check the pics below for some of these gems. It was a 3-story club, with a mostly hip-hop soundtrack. We waited about 30 minutes to get in, but were lucky to do so, as our group had more guys than girls, which is EXTREMELY frowned upon by the bouncers at local clubs. They say, “It better be 50-50, or else ‘we’re at capacity, sorry.’” We slipped by ‘em, though.
After class on Friday, our whole group went to the Mercedes-Benz museum. Stuttgart (where my University is) is home to the headquarters of both Mercedes-Benz and Porsche. They both have big museums and corporate operations here, but so far, we’ve 
only visited the Mercedes Museum. I digress…The M-B museum was pretty darn sweet. I liked the cars and all, but the history of it was the most interesting. They had a great historical dialog that told of their early days experimenting with the most simple of gasoline engines to their involvement in developing the first modern passenger car to their involvement in WWII and afterward. Pretty cool stuff. Their museum was other-worldly, as well, as you see on the right, was very space-age design oriented. One disappointment was that we didn’t get to see any of their actual operation, their manufactring plants and the like. I’m guessing most of that is intellectual property anyway…oh, well.
On Saturday, we boarded the bus early on the University campus to head to Heidelberg Germany. We took the bus for a couple hours and then boarded a boat, for a trip up the Rhine river to Heidelberg. Very, very beautiful surroundings. Great hills with forest cover, and every so often a castle or medieval-era building or settlement would just pop 
up. Great stuff. While in Heidelberg we visited the castle there, and it was awesome. The same type of stuff you’d see in movies. WWII did a heck of a job on this region, with most of the old-era buildings requiring restoration, which is a bummer, but I couldn’t tell for most of it. They do a great job with era-accurate restorations. Along with the castle, I drank beer out of a boot (a glass boot), bought some local gummy-bears (they’re famous), and bummed around picturesque Germany like there was no tomorrow. I have great stories that must be told in person, so be sure to ask when I get back.
Well, here’s a good one that you might enjoy…Last night Matt and I got back to town at about 9:00 after the trip. To get home, we knew we would have to catch a train to our bus stop, and our bus left on the hour, every hour at :04. Matt caught a ride to the train station, but I decided to walk to a different train, just for fun, but we both ended up at our bus stop at 10:00. Just in time to catch the 10:04…or so we thought. So, as Matt and I are BS’ing at the bus stop, I happen to glance at the bus schedule, and say, “Dude, no way!” I’m pointing at the stop schedule and it says that on Saturdays, the bus stops there every hour, from 7 A.M. to 11 P.M., at :04 past the hour, EXCEPT for 10:04. It makes no sense, but it’s the truth. Whatever, we say, and we decide to make the walk home. It’s only about a 40 minute walk, and we’ve made it before, no biggie, so we set out on our trek home. Using the same general direction, but not the identical route, we trudge through the streets of Mühle thinking that we’ll hit the highway eventually, and use that to navigate the rest of the way home. Let’s just say that we didn’t hit the highway. After about 30 minutes of walking (last time we hit the highway after about 10 mins.) we decide that it might be a good idea to reassess our path. Our two best options are to enter the woods, and as it’s now dark, we don’t think that either of those paths are good ideas, so we decide to head back into town to find a landmark and call our host family and have them point us in the right direction from there. We start walking through town, and aren’t finding any landmarks, so we think, “maybe we’ll just retrace our steps and end up at the bus stop in time for the 11:04.” That sounds good and all, except for the fact that we weren’t sure we were really retracing our steps…anyway. We ended up running across a bus that said it was going toward the train-line that we rode to our bus stop, so we ran to get on that, and that took us to the end of the train line. We ended up riding the train 15 minutes back to our bus stop, and then waited 15 minutes for the 11:04 to pick us up. An eventful ending to a long day. :) We had walked the wrong way through one municipality, through another, and then into a third. Crazy, huh?
All in all, it was a good week. I’m getting into a sort of groove, and hopefully, if my rail-pass comes this week, I’ll be able to travel this weekend, as it’s a long weekend. Thanks to all for reading, and thanks for all the good emails and comments. Remember, if you want to receive my blog posts via email, just click on the envelope button in the top-right portion of my site. Tschüss! (Bye!)
Pictures of the week
Here’s me being ridiculous in my neon-ware.
Here I am pre-boot.
…and post-boot. My camera-man was shaky, not me. 
This is in the back of the Heidelberg castle.
And the castle from the east.
Also, be sure to check out my Flickr photostream, at flickr.com/chris_daugaard, because I’ve posted more photos there. They just take longer to put them all in blog posts. 
