The Return of the Roving Internationals

Germany has too many castles. In the US, giving people directions using castles as landmarks would be very clear communication. (though there might not be any useful directions one could give using castles) Here, however, it just serves as more points of confusion.

For example, this morning we were told to meet behind the old castle, where the bus would pick us up for our day trip to Heidelberg. Great. No problem, right? Wrong. We got there half an hour early, and were really glad we did. After walking around 3 different "castles" that bordered bus areas in around a two block area in downtown Stuttgart, we finally found the correct area. (Conveniently distinguished by the massive gathering of international college-age students speaking every language except German)

I had actually already been to Heidelberg once before, when I was here visiting my uncle, but as we walked around the only thing I managed to remember/recognize from the last time I was there, was the student kiss chocolates. That left a good portion of the city open to re-exploration.

The majority of the time was preplanned by the international student program. We started with a nice ferry ride up the river. With our group added to the regular ferry group, we probably almost reached on average the average age of Germany. (ie there were a lot of senior citizens, tiny children but no middle aged adults) Their comments (made oh so secretly in German) ranged from speculating about our purpose on the ferry (we were clearly members of the dangerous"teenage" species they had heard about) to a rather in depth literary discussion which I was, sadly, unable to completely follow.

Arriving in Heidelberg we got to eat lunch (finally- it was almost 1pm) at a popular German-student restaurant. Their entire tables looked like overly graffitied desks in certain ancient lecture halls. There was graffiti on the graffiti.

Because walking after eating comes highly recommended, we then immediately went on a walking tour of Heidelberg seeing such sights as: a monkey statue (simultaneously bringing you luck, dissing some long dead ruler of the north and elevating everyone's education through archaic German poetry), the pedestrian bridge (to be honest, I was distracted by the view and didn't hear anything. I think maybe the river flooded a few times. They blamed some volcano in Iceland) and the student prison (since real prison might've actually worked, they needed to come up with their own system to make sure it didn't).

The view from the bridge was really distracting

With the little amount of free time left we walked the length of their pedestrian main street (supposedly the longest in Europe) snacking on delicious cake (without forks) and buying gummi bears in new exciting flavors. (but not the spicy ones, because that's just weird)

Local cakes are really tasty