Berlin to Stuttgart

08/05/09
21:04
We are finally at Ben and Maria’s apartment in Berlin. More to come on the journey here later, but for now we are about to head out to a much needed and very late dinner…

08/06/09
01:19
Corey and I are finally finished repacking our things to exclude our large suitcases for the next month. He and Ben and I went to a great dinner at a Thai place within reasonable walking distance of his apartment. On the way there Ben explained the “squats” to us… Basically buildings taken by the government when East and West Germany combined, then lost in such a legal mess that squatters have taken over and lived in them for years, most of them subsiding on welfare from the government. We came back to the apartment to find Ben’s wife Maria. The four of us talked for a little while, then Corey went to packing and I was delighted to see Jeanne on Google Talk, so she and I were able to video chat for a little while. The whole video chatting thing through Google worked surprisingly well, and it just seems to be much less of a headache than Skype. It being almost 1:30 in the morning HERE, I’m really wiped, and I’m ready to go to bed. We have a long train ride ahead of us tomorrow morning. We’ll be waking up at the same time as Ben and Maria at 6:30, then getting out of the house by 7:40 to get to the main train station in Berlin by 8:00. Ben and Maria will head out on a train for work at 8:03, then Corey and I will get on a train bound for Stuttgart at 8:32. The travel time listed is 5h36m, so we should be getting to Stuttgart around 2pm. As much as we’d like to see the old city, we will probably skip this one and head straight to the Porsche Museum. It’s on the outskirts of town, and our hotel is right next door to it.

Thomas