Ulm

I've decided that for the second half of my stay in Germany I'm going to travel less. I want to stick around and get to know Stuttgart and Germany itself better. There are a dozen small towns and cities nearby that are supposed to be really nice, so I'm going to take day trips on the weekends to visit them.

I am also broke. There's something about traveling to 9 different destinations in only 11 weeks that stresses out the wallet. Therefore me and my wallet have reached a mutual agreement to stick around Germany.

The first adorable German city to be crossed off the list is Ulm. It's about 100 km south-east of Stuttgart on the Danube river and it is abso-freakin-lutely adorable. The buildings were so picturesque ....so fairy-tale-esque.

Something sort of exciting, EINSTEIN was born in Ulm! Ok, so he left when he was only one years old but still. Somebody thought it'd be a good idea to climb the memorial...

Funny how people and places try to claim famous people as their own. When Hawksley Workman first emerged in the music business my highschool made a big deal out of the fact that he went there. What they didn't tell us and I found out later was that he only came for a semester before going to Huntsville. And if they'd known he was going to suck I'm sure they wouldn't have claimed him at all.

The only real tourist attraction is the Ulm Münster. It's a big gothic chapel, and in fact the tallest church in the world. The steeple is 161.53 m high and I climbed all 768 spiral stairs all the way to the very top. You'd think the engineers would have thought to at least reverse the direction of the spiral every so often. I almost fell down them on the way back down because I got so dizzy.


We saw some traditional dance going on in the street on arrival, that was fun. And then we also saw this crazy advertisement that wasn't standing still. It was moving around. Of course, this was fascinating so we stopped to watch it and tried to figure out what was making it move. Then I had the idea to surround it and see what would happen. So that's what we did! Eventually we found the guy with the remote control off in a crowd somewhere, but how brilliant is that marketing technique! Create an add that silly people like us will chase around . Too bad none of us could actuallyread it.

Next a crazy doctor blew me a heart balloon flower thing, it was very romantic. Or it would have been if I wasn't a bit of a globophobe, and wasn't afraid that he was going to turn around and try to charge me 15 euros for it like the bracelet guys in Paris.

All in all it was a really nice day. We took a stroll along the top of the city wall along the river, ate some traditional Swabien cuisine (Swabia is the area in Germany I live in), and I did not get a sunburn.

Alles gut.