Sunday in Stuttgart

Stuttgart is about 40 minutes away by train and I have these Eurail days to use up, so I headed over there for the day. Because I am a guy, I went to the Porche museum (I did not have time to go to the Mercedes Museum too). Honey, here is my next car.

Here is my first car.

This is across from the New Schloss and where I had lunch. When it started to pour, I brought my meal inside.

Here is the new Schloss, which is 200-250 years old. The old Schloss dates back to 950.


This is the modern art museum, nicknamed the "cube." I liked the featured exhibit more than the regular stuff.

This is my attempt at an artsy photo from within the cube. My talents lie elsewhere.

A digression

I have discovered that almost all German cities have wonderful public places. Most of my colleagues in Mannheim complain that it is not a very pretty city and, compared to the local competition, it is not. However, they have made the best of what they have. The Rathaus, Paradeplatz, Planken, and Wassarturm areas are nicer than any comparable place in Arlington, Dallas, Fort Worth, etc. And they use their public spaces extensively. Every evening the cafe crowds flow out onto the sidewalks and squares with tables where one can get coffee, beer, or ice cream if not a full meal. The difference in cities is how much they were endowed with natural beauty, historical significance, or how well the spaces have been managed (over hundreds of years). Mannheim is not so well endowed, Heidelberg, Wien and Zürich are. Even then, Mannheim blows Arlington out of the water.

Stuttgart is somewhere in between. The public places are lovely and obviously well loved. I get the feeling, though, that it is trying to be a major city rather than the middle tier that it is. It is home to about 600,000 people about the same size as Fort Worth. Come to think of it, Fort Worthers seem to share this ambivalence with being a comfortable small city or a major metropolitan area. (Arlington also would like to be thought of as a bigger player than it is and it is half the size of Fort Worth. Arlington's unofficial motto is "We're nobody's damn suburb," which, of course, means that it is.)