Culture College

Jim and I attended a two day culture college that was offered through Army Community Services.  The first day was in the classrom; it was an overview of the German language.  We learned how to pronounce all the letters in the alphabet, how to respond to the question, "What is your name?" and how to spell our names aloud in German.  We spent a long time going over numbers up to a thousand.  This helped a lot because now when I hear numbers at the grocery store or at the biergarten when they are calling people's order numbers, I am starting to understand what they are!  The tricky part is that the numbers 20+ are said in reverse in German, and (like most words in German) there are no spaces between the words, i.e.:

• 32 is said "zveiunddreizig" (zvei  und  dreizig, which translates to "two and thirty"
• 67 is said "siebenundsechzig" (sieben  und  sechzig, or "seven and sixty"

Quite a tongue twister, huh?

Day 2 of the culture college was a great day.  We took the public bus to a nearby train station and rode the train into Stuttgart.  At the train station, our teacher walked us through how to purchase tickets at the ticket machine.  The machine has about 10 different options for train tickets, and she pressed each button and explained each one (day pass for one adult, group ticket, reduced fairs, etc.).  We had a break to get a snack from one of the many bakeries in the train station and to see the view from the top of the station.

(As always, you can click on any of the photos below to view them full screen.)

Koenigstrasse (King Street) is a pedestrian street with lots of shops--I want to come back to shop!)

Next our teacher gave us a tour of a couple of the plazas near the train station, then we walked through an outdoor farmers' market as well as an indoor one.

I liked this clock.  The bulls rammed heads as the clock struck noon.

After lunch a bus took us to Schloss Solitude, or Palace of Solitude.  We had a tour of the inside of the palace.  It was very pretty and will be the first of many palaces and castles we see during our time here in Germany!  

The last stop on our tour was Ritter Sport Chocolate Factory.  Have you heard of Ritter Sport?  It is a famous chocolate company that calls Stuttgart its home.  The company makes its chocolate bars in the shape of a square instead of a long bar.  They began doing this because the square shape was less likely than a long chocolate bar to break in the pocket of men's sports jackets when they went to sporting events.  They have probably 20 or 30 different flavors of chocolate, ranging from chocolate with whole hazelnuts to chocolate with cornflakes and chocolate with yogurt filling or wafers inside.  THEY ARE SO DELICIOUS!  We got two bars free with the tour and bought several more as well. :)

What a great day to get to know our new city--kid free, too!  We met a lot of really nice other couples who had also just moved to Stuttgart in the last month or two.