262: Five cities in five nights
Starting last night, we're moving through five different cities in five nights; Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Paris, Menton, and then Nice. It's honestly really fun to be rolling like this; we packed light, and we have lots of places to be, so we're always on the move.
It is a weird juxtaposition, though, between my constant moving and the absolute lack of background requirements. I'm mostly talking about schoolwork; I was sitting on the train this morning (which was amazing) reading a book, and my brain kept nagging me that I surely had something I needed to be doing during that time, I didn't have the bandwidth to be reading. Reading is for people with free time! I'm never one of those people; except that right now, I am! I don't have any assignments I need to work on or small things I need to cram into the nooks and crannies of my day, I have the space to simply exist, and it's incredibly refreshing.
Today was awesome. We're in Stuttgart, like I mentioned up top, which is a German city known for its automakers. We're here on my specific request, because when planning this trip, my mom gave me the couple days in the middle (between Amsterdam and Menton) and asked what I wanted to do with them, and I said car museum!!. I've always been a huge car person, and Stuttgart is home to two of the most prestigious automakers, and their associated museums, which we're hitting earlier today and tomorrow morning, before the train to Paris.
The museum today was the Mercedes museum, and it was dope.
Here's a small selection of photos from today; there were some incredibly cool cars on display.
I also started a really cool thing that I'm going to try and edit together where I get photos of all of the cars different rims (I didn't have the idea until partway through the museum, so I don't have all of them, but I have enough for it to be cool), and then I smash-cut them together in a video, lining up the center of the rim, so it does a cool montage-esque sequence of all of the cars I looked at.
No spoilers for that yet, but I'm going to try and figure it out on the train tomorrow, wish me luck!
After the Mercedes museum it was about dinnertime, so we took the train back, dropped off our stuff, and then went exploring in the mall that's right next to our hotel. It was interesting, because it was a pretty normal mall, honestly, just with a ton of stores I'd never heard of, some of them very amusing. There were multiple shops that were dedicated to American culture and food, which I found pretty hilarious. We went to a Poshmark, which I would describe as an "IRL Shein". Everything was super cheap and (probably) low quality, but there was a shirt I liked that I bought for like 12 euros.
After that we went to a really good-looking Italian restaurant we'd seen beforehand called L'Osteria. It was a ~20 minute wait, but we decided to wait it out (didn't have anything else to be doing), and it was totally worth it. I had a Braccio di Ferro pizza, which is pizza with eggs and basil and mozzarella on it, and my mom had some pasta I don't remember, but she ate the whole thing! The pizza was so much bigger than I was anticipating, something like two feet across, but it was delicious, and I ate almost the whole thing.
After that we just came back to the room, and I've been working on my photos. I also got to talk to my lovely girlfriend today, which was really nice, even if it means I'm back to my old ways again (it's 12:32AM as I write this, I'm waking up at ~7:30). That's not really her fault, I definitely could have been in bed earlier, but here we are.
I have too many photos from today to not share more, so here's a couple highlights:
I also had a super fun little encounter today with a nice german man who asked about my shoes. He started talking in German at first, so I didn't pick up he was talking to me, but we were on our way back to the hotel, and for the last ~200m, he and I just talked barefoot shoes, and it was really neat. He was wearing a different brand (just barefoot, not toe), but he said mine were cool and that he loved wearing them (as do I!). It was a really neat little random encounter.
I'm not going to say much more than that though, I really should be going to sleep, and I can let the photos speak for themselves today 😄.
There'll be many more tomorrow, we're visiting the Porsche museum, and then we're off to Paris! I'm super excited.