Oi, mates.
It was off to Stuttgart yesterday as planned. I got there in great time, as traffic was fine and the unrestricted areas of the autobahn did allow me to hit my car’s top speed of about 210 km/h. (Aside: I’m driving the new VW Golf with 2.0L TDI diesel engine, due to be released in Canada in October. I’d consider buying one.) Stuttgart is really much closer than I really think it is.
Church was great. The message covered Luke 15, which is pretty joyful. The congregation was bigger than I expected. I was lead to believe that 200-250 people showed up this week, but was told that the church congregation is in the 500 people area. It is primarily made up of Americans serving the US military, though there was a mix of others. (I met a guy from South Africa, for example.) One really interesting thing was singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” in a mix of English and German (Heilig, Heilig, Heilig). I’m not very good at singing German.
From IBC Stuttgart I went down to the city centre and discovered a Sommerfest! But before exploring it I made a quick detour to Starbucks to enjoy one of their world famous iced coffees. I think this made the Sommerfest even better, as the bulk of stands set up were cocktail bars–not places of much interest to me. I walked around, sat a bit, listened to some of the music, and ate some ribs. The size of the event was impressively large.
Stuttgart is a great city. Even just walking around the Schloßgarten was nice and relaxing. I thought a bit about my other visits to Stuttgart and recalled the Built to Spill concert, the rainy day with Katy, the first time I came to Germany and had no idea what I was doing, leaving Stuttgart and then letting Evan drive on the autobahn–some fine memories.
After visiting the centre I went to the Porsche museum. This was very cool. I had the audio guide to help guide me through what I was looking at. I saw some airplane engines, and learned that Porsche designed the original VW Beetle! At the end I bought a neat little book that includes photos and text about the cars in the museum, which should be a nice coffee table compliment to my book about the BMW Welt.
After leaving the museum I thought about eating a nice, traditional Swabian meal and possibly staying to watch a movie but I decided it would be much nicer to share a meal with some German friends in Karlsruhe–and, I have a large list of movies that I still need to watch at home. So I returned home and we eventually all went to Multi Kulti in Karlsruhe. I’m definitely going to miss German food when I leave.
Who told you you were good at singing in English? HA!