Ludwigsburg and Esslingen

On Wednesday the Deutsch Kompakt course took a day excursion to Ludwigsburg and Esslingen, two town each about an hour away from Tuebingen. The bus left at 8:30 in the morning. Kind of early, but they had pretzels and juice for breakfast so that helped to make up for the early start time.

The first stop of the day was the castle in Ludwigsburg. It was ridiculous. I wouldn't have called it a castle, more of a mansion or palace. There were 250 rooms, and we didn't even get through fifty of them in the hour and a half that we were there. We did see some pretty spectacular paintings of old kings and queens of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The first King weighed 200 kilos, approximately 440 pounds.

After we finished our tour in the castle we went to the Film Academy in Ludwigsburg. There are three other film academies in Germany besides the one that we saw. We were given tours by a couple of students, and then we got to watch a couple of the films that had been made by students there. They were really good.

After the we finished watching movies we loaded back into the bus to head to Esslingen. In Esslingen we were supposed to have a tour of the city, but the weather was absolutely terrible. So most people hunkered down in cafes to wait for dinner. I found a juggling store to amuse myself in.

At seven o'clock we all met in a wine cellar for dinner and wine tasting. It was a typical german dinner, bread, ham, salami, cheese, mustard, hardboiled eggs, pickles, cucumber, and tomatoes. It was very tasty and a really enjoyable evening. After dinner everyone got back on the bus and headed back to Tuebingen.