Tuesday 23 May 2017

My first trip to Germany (April 2017)

So after living it up in the Caribbean, I needed to go somewhere this month to hit my target of travelling somewhere every month in 2017. But it had to be somewhere that wouldn’t impact too hard on the purse strings. So I couldn’t refuse a 2 night free hotel stay in Stuttgart. I had always imagined my first trip to Germany would be Berlin so travelling to this lesser known city initially threw me. Less than an hour and a half flight was the first plus. Came painfully close to missing the flight (Euro Wings) due to a bad accident which closed the motorway but praise God I made it.  Le Meridian allowed an early check in which was great so after dumping the bags in the room, the first stop was The Mercedes Museum. Interesting enough it’s not normally opened on Mondays but as this was Easter Monday, it was opened for the day. To my surprise I spent a lot longer here than intended. Not remotely interested in cars but what I liked was that the exhibit related to what was going on in society during the various eras and how that impacted the car industry.

My next two days were spent exploring the city and enjoying the lovely spa at the hotel. I have membership at my local spa so I tend not to waste too much time on holiday lying in steam rooms but I loved the headed beds at the hotel’s spa so had to give a good half hour each day to this.
I visited the States Gallery but stayed there less than an hour as I found it a little bland.

Streusel
An authentic schnitzel was at the top of my list to try and while it did disappoint (not a huge fan of escalope either) at least I can say I ate one in Germany. What didn’t disappoint though was the berry streusel pastry I purchased from a small patisserie. I’m not normally a fan of custard and did eat around it a bit but the base and the crumble topping was amazing. My sweet tooth was in further sugar heaven when I call across a sale on Ritter Sport chocolate bars and Lindt Easter Eggs.

Chocolate heaven 
It was quite a laid back city break. In fact, the most adventurous thing I did was ordering from a restaurant that had no English menus. This I believed would be a throughly authentic experience but I caved slightly and asked which were the lamb dishes and blindly picked one.