Blogs from Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, Europe

We were determined to get one true hike in during this portion of our trip. The Stuttgart hikes while nice did not actually hit the points of intention and getting lost prevented a full loop completion. We had until our train left at 13:00 to get this done. We picked out the Bad Urach Falls located 37 minutes outside of Tubingen. Fritz and Lea thought we were NUTS for squeezing in one more thing, but when has that stopped us before... 5:30 AM alarms went off and 6:15 we were on the road (the car return time was by 9:00 AM). We found the place pretty easy...check 1. It was still dark and after looking at 4 different signs and having the parking meter eat our money we were still no more certain on where to ... read more

We went to Tobingen to meet a friend of Shelby's who was a foreign exchange student at Royalton. Fritz and Lea were kind enough to let us stay with them for the weekend. Fritz is in dentistry school and Lea is studying English at university. They showed us around Tobingen (it wasn't bombed during WWII due to what they think was a British liking to the town). The town square is incredibly old and looks like the ski lodges we try to create only real. They exposed us to "real" Kabobs which I jokingly teased Fritz about them only being a gyro. We had good conversations about their school system, immigration, American views on politics and world politics, and our recent trip to museums in Berlin. The one thing driving me nuts was there were no ... read more

Over the past few days we have been working on the presentation that we were to give to those which we have been introduced to and worked with during our time here. It was important that we all gathered our notes, and experiences together to discuss what should be part of this. After deciding on the factors, we then went through, together, what we believed to be important to that particular point. After the team effort of producing presentation, we then decided who would be speaking about what parts, and whether some points were a group focus. We were then able to go through and refresh our knowledge on our specific points. All in preparation for today’s presentation! We introduced the presentation by giving some background information about where Durham is located and in relation to ... read more

This morning it was work experience with the apprentices of Tübingen. We went all went off to different offices with one of the German apprentices. Firstly I worked with Anna Lina in the Rathaus to look at how she inputs data into the system for the amount of people who voted in different villages. She said for elections the age is 18 but for council voting people could vote at the age of 16 although she said not many young people vote for the council ones. She also showed me other tasks, like putting applications on for the ‘Bundesverdienstkreuz’ which is translated to ‘Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany’. Only 200,000 individuals in total have been awarded this and it is for the recognition and gratitude of deserving men and women of the ... read more

On Saturday morning we made an early journey across town and to the train station to head to Stuttgart. After buying our tickets we managed to catch our train fairly easily and began heading through the snowy German countryside to Stuttgart. Upon arrival we tried to work out which underground train we needed to take to try and get to the other side of the city where the Mercedes Benz arena (football stadium) and the Mercedes Benz museum were situated. After a few wrong trains and an hour of confusion we had to follow a group of the Stuttgart youth team who were going to training so that we could board the right bus and get to the ground. After having a look at the huge ground we ventured to the club shop where we bought ... read more