A Friday and a Saturday In Ludwigsburg

After leaving work Friday, I used to nav system to take me to a shopping mall as I needed to get a cable so I could use this wonderful typee pooter thing in Europe.

What struck me about the mall was how American it was for the most part. Except for the fact that there was a flower and vegetable stall. And a newsagents. In fact, it did look very much like an American mall with an English crumby inner city shopping center influence.

I found the electronics store and eventually the cable I needed. Alas, no power converter for my cell phone but whatever. At least I would have internet.

So I goes to pay. I thinks – lets use my American Express. They don’t take Am Ex. How about Visa? Mastercard? Nope. Cash only. Perhaps I am becoming too Americanized, but I thought that almost everybody took some form of credit cards – especially a store that (can’t remember the name) was part of a chain and as big as a Circuit City. Confused

Off I goes back to hotel, had to work from room for a while, and I go out to get food. From a very nice seafood restaurant, and a waitress who helped me with German in return for me explaining what each fish was in English. Naturally I had a beer.

Saturday morning, I was awoken by the church bells – that was cool. I again had to spend a few hours working but eventually I got out and went for lunch to the same place as Night 1. Had pizza, good, and watched as people started breaking glass all over the floor. Now that was bizarre, but nobody seemed to care. I just don’t know! Perhaps it's a German thing.

Back to the hotel and back to work, I then took a walk, seen a little tiny smart car. Cars are a lot smaller in Europe; I had forgotten that.

I walked down a really nice path to the “Residential Palace”, a HUGE building, apparently built around 1720, by the Duke Eberhard Ludwig. I bet he chose Ludwigsburg as a place to live cos it sounded like his name hehehe. It was actually really nice there, loads of gold type buildings.. pics to follow.

Hotel then out to eat, had some sort of German curry in a café that was really busy, again I was helped by an extremely friendly waitress, who, despite telling me that her English was very poor, seemed to have no problems getting by. With my food I had, believe it or not, beer. In fact, my wonderful waitress, after talking to me about the range of beers they had, presented me with a bunch of small complimentary samples of each beer they had. I can’t remember what they were called but the dark one was the best.

All in all, I found the people in Ludwigsburg extremely friendly and accommodating.