Stuttgart

We arrived in Stuttgart, checked into our hostel and had some very traditional German food for lunch, Subway! At this stage we didn't have a map and we walked around a fair bit but Subway was all we could find. We went back to the hostel to get a map and figure out what to do with our afternoon.
We were tossing up between a car museum (they have a Porsche museum and a Mercedes Benz museum here) and the Zoo. We both voted for the zoo so after working out how to buy a train ticket off we went.
The zoo was pretty typical of a zoo in Australia. But still pretty dam cool! We saw polar bears, tigers, giraffes, elephants, penguins, seals, etc etc. They also had catfish fish everywhere, in a lot of the enclosures they had carp fish just swimming around and in the aquarium section they had quite a few tanks that seemed to have nothing but carp fish in them. I figure this is either because Germans are crazy for catfish, or there was a massive sale on catfish when they were opening up the zoo.
After a few hours wandering around (oh also we had to use our hands like cups to drink water from taps because they only sold sparkling water at the zoo, sparkling water is the most disgusting thing i have ever tasted and here in Europe it seems to be impossible to tell if water is still or sparkling by reading the bottle, even a bottle that says 'natural sport water' might still be sparkling. our new test is to secretly open the bottles before we buy them to listen for the hissing sound) we got the train back into central Stuttgart to get some dinner and have a look around the shops.
The next day we decided to do the walking tour recommended on our map, we saw (and went into) a library that has the worlds most important collection of bibles. we couldn't find the bibles but at least we got to be in the same building as something so important. we still don't know what made that particular collection THE most important one in the world. We saw a palace where kings used to chill out back in the day and we went to the Art Gallery.

The Art Gallery
The Art Gallery was an interesting place, if anyone ever wants to go to the Stuttgart Art Gallery go on a Saturday because it is FREE!!! Which we didn't even know until we got there and tried to hand over some money. Anyway it is a bit of a bizarre collection of old and new. they have a room full of medieval religious artworks and then one random modern art piece that would just be a canvas painted red with a blue line down the middle of it. another room had a pipe running from one wall to another, a chair and then lots of plaster dust on the ground, at thought we thought this was renovations until we saw the sign and realised this was considered to be art. when we looked closer the whole room was full of random objects that apparently are now called art.
My favourite piece of art in the gallery was a statue of a woman cleaning the floor, it was so life like that both me and Ewen stood staring at it (in a non obvious way) for several minutes thinking it was a real person doing a live performance piece or something. Oh another display was about 6 fake sausages hanging from strings... I'm pretty sure when i get back i am going to be an artist, i could totally do that!!
When we left the gallery it started raining almost as soon as we stepped out the door. It was about 3pm by this stage so we decided to head back to the hostel to do our washing. by the time we got back we were pretty saturated and weren't happy to find that the closest laundromat was back in the center of Stuttgart so we had to get the train. It turned out OK though, we got to the laundromat and started out load just before a big influx of people so we got to sit back and watch Germans argue over who got to which washer first.
That night we had Chinese for dinner and packed up our stuff ready to leave for Paris the next morning.

The Train Station with the Mercedes Benz symbol on the top