Weekend 4

This weekend I headed off to Stuttgart to visit Danielle. So work
wasn't all that important on Friday to tell you about. The most
notable thing was the huge dark cloud moving in at lunch time. Frank
bet me that it would rain before I left and he won but was nice enough
to drive me to the train station.

I was able to take the train to Stuttgart and switch once all by
myself :) When I arrived Danielle was there to meet me. We headed
towards her house but stopped at the grocery store on the way there.
We were making the family that she lives with a what Danielle called
"A Canadian Supper" So we made them nachos and potato skins. They had
never had nachos before. The mom was very nice and loved the dinner.
She even brought out special Italian wine for the occasion. Not sure
if nachos and potato skins are the right meal for wine but it was good
none the less.

After dinner we headed out to meet some people in downtown Stuttgart.
It was a great night we went to a few different "disco's" as they are
called here. Danielle and I had many people ask us where we were from
when they saw/heard us speaking English. A few asked if we were
Americans! Once we said we were from Canada people always seemed to
think we were more interesting. The one thing to be said about the
night is that people around here need to learn how to dance! there
were a few people who could but most looked like they were doing a bad
version of the robot! I couldn`t help but laughing many times
throughout the night. After we were done at the disco we grabbed some
pizza and some water without bubbles before heading home. The discos
are open until 5am but we didn`t stay that long!

Saturday we took the time to sleep in before heading out for a day of
wandering. After breakfast we took the Ubahn to down town. There is a
great system set up in Stuttgart for the trains. This is why when we
arrived we ran into one of the many peaceful protest (but huge) about
not building a new network. It would mean a lot of money and tearing
up parts of the city. We walked past a few differnt stations that
people were protesting at. We walked around then headed to the Sky
Beach. This is basically a top of a building that has been covered in
sand and beach chairs. It was really nice until the storm started
rolling in. When we decided to leave it was very close and by the time
we were back on street level it was pouring! So we window shopped
around a bit and went to a cafe to wait it out. At the cafe we were
sitting at a table and the people beside us started to speak English
(huge deal now that I`m here). We asked them where they were from and
turns out from Canada! Two of them were visiting the other who is here
with the Stuttgart ballet. After talking with them for a while the
storm cleared and we parted ways.

Once we were done exploring we picked a few more things at the grocery
store as we made the family spaghetti, salad and garlic bread that
night. We were planning on meeting some people from Danielle`s work
but ended up talking to Karen (host mom) for a long time and were too
tired. So we watched a movie and went to bed so we could get up
earlier on Sunday.