Books, Books, Books

I like reading. Probably too much, but I don't believe in such a horrific idea. Hence, I continued (from yesterday) my search for books. First off, I went back to the small probably-not-a-chain book store (hard to tell, but it looked.. smaller?) and checked out... the middle school grade range. woo! By reading the first few pages of different books, I discovered my reading level in German was about that of a 7th graders. I feel so smart. ><

I was also looking for some stuff in English. I was originally going to download books to an eReader, but I've run into this cool I-have-no-interenet problem. So, back to paper. (I'm actually not too upset about this particular side affect). However, the small bookstore didn't have English books, so I tried to follow their directions to a different book store.

However, I know almost nothing about how Stuttgartians? refer to their towns/ surrounding villages, so I went the wrong way. Despite that, I found a book store with a similar sounding name. It was even a bookstore I didn't expect to exist. You see, unlike in American malls where all the shops are listed on every floor, in the Schwaben Galerie, only shops on that floor are listed on the sign. SO WEIRD.

After being directed at that store back to where I had come from, they suggested... the library. It was around the main train station and was a cube. I "couldn't miss it." They clearly hadn't met me.

First I had to decipher "main train station." I was in Vahingen. Which had Vahingen Hauptbahnhof (main station) then there was the Hauptbahnhof in downtown Stuttgart. Then there was Hauptbahnhofs for every other tiny village-town-district thing like Vahingen. After staring at the map for around 5 minutes, I found a station labeled "Stadtbibliothek".. yay libraries!

Taking the instructed route (S Bahn, then U Bahn) seemed way too simple, so I of course decided to walk from the Hauptbahnhof to the library. It was in the area, right? So they couldn't be thaaaat far apart. And they weren't

But I literally almost walked right past it (the giant gray cube and all -- literally a cube. It's surprisingly easy to get lost/confused inside.) In the salesperson's defense, there was quite a bit of construction blocking the way. And it did say LIBRARY (in English even) in big bright shiny letters.

There were a lot of cranes

The final barrier between me and books and DVDS (in German and English, can be checked out for four weeks) was getting a library card. Just like in the US, you needed proof of residence. You also needed a passport. I had one of the two. (but they were nice and accepted a weird PDF saying some generic things about where I would be living as proof I was living in Stuttgart) So, for 4 euro/ month I can now check out items from the library! (I'm actually really, really, really excited about this :D :D :D :D :D... can you tell? :D :D :D )