What I've been up to: October 5 ed.

This week was a continuation of my vacation with my parents and younger brother. I hope to write more about it in detail, but for now, here's the short version:

-We stayed overnight in Kaiserslautern, after just barely catching the last train home from Saarbruecken since our bus from Paris was late.

-We traveled to Ludwigsburg and visited the palace there, taking a tour completely in German. As if I didn't know this already, the tour confirmed that my grasp of German is still very basic. The tour guide was running out of time so she spoke very quickly. I wasn't sure if Carl Eugen had 300 children or 300 pairs of shoes.* The latter made more sense to me but when I inquired what he had 300 of during a lull, I learned that it was children. I wondered how he was able to get anything else done.

-Then we moved on to Stuttgart, where we attended the Canstatter Wasen, or Volksfest. It's similar to Oktoberfest. It was okay but I'm kind of over big fests.

-We took a tour of the Mercedes factory. It was free and quite interesting.

-Moving on, we stayed in Nuremberg for two days. I've been once before for class, but that visit was limited to two museums so it was good to further explore the city. My brother and I made a new acquaintance, a local guy, who was awesome and gave us a lot of information about the area.

-We attended the wine festival at Neustadt an der Weinstrasse. This was more of my scene.

-On Sunday, we visited the Roteweinfest in Ingelheim am Rhein.



*Other sources I've briefly read don't mention that many kids so I wonder if I'm still getting it wrong!

Roadside candy machines: Abandoned in Ingelheim!

During my family's visit, we took a trip to Ingelheim, which is called "die Roteweinstadt," or "red wine city." In fact, the point of the trip was to visit the red wine festival being hosted by this city on the Rhein River, near Mainz.

On the way to the festival, we saw the emptied out roadside candy below. It looked sad and forlorn. However, the ones with dusty candy also look that way to me.