Five hours in Stuttgart

This isn’t nearly enough time to explore a place properly, or get to know anything very interesting about it. And the fact I arrived at around 7am on the night train didn’t exactly help: there was nothing to see during the early hours of darkness so I waited for the sun to rise in a café at the station.

After that I had a nice walk around the city, famous for being the nerve centre of Mercedes Benz. My main impression was that central Stuttgart is very similar to Berlin, but a smaller version. There were lots of shops, people and some nice buildings to see. Streets were busy with cars and there was generally a lot going on.

My favourite part of this short excursion was the discovery of what I would call a real Christmas market, or “Weihnachtsmarkt” in German. It was full of little stalls and shops with friendly owners, all selling something different, and I enjoyed browsing around. The fragrance of fresh pine trees was a nice touch. This was such a contrast with the market I’d found in Prague a few days earlier. It wasn’t a tourist trap, not cheesy in the least and full of native people rather than visitors – I think I was one of the only non-Germans there.

In fact, during the whole time I only saw one other blatant group of tourists, they were Japanese. Stuttgart obviously isn’t as popular a destination as Prague or other places in Germany, such as Berlin. So that means it’s actually quite refreshing to visit: you can get a real sense of how the people live and you don’t get blinded by the false face many major cities put on for people from abroad.

Sadly, I didn’t have any more time to explore Stuttgart because my train was leaving at 13.11 and I couldn’t afford to miss it. Last night’s journey was fairly unspectacular and luckily I managed to get in a good few hours’ sleep; I’m going to need the strength and energy for my journeys ahead.