After flying all Saturday from Tokyo to Stuttgart we woke up to a sunny Sonntag in Stuttgart.

We bumped into Luke and André at the hotel, and headed into Stuttgart proper with them to just sort of hang around. We walked a bit and took a few pics, then settled in for some solid beer and pizza at the schlossplatz.

Later in the arvo we got enthusiastic and walked southish up a hill to catch a view. We were going to get icecream but the queue was insane. Eventually we headed back to the platz for a coffee in the rapidly cooling evening. A really nice chill out day.

Sometime midweek Arnd drove Jeremy, André and I up to the Fernsehturm. The view was awesome, I did a panorama which I really like. It was pretty chilly generally, but 150 metres above the ground it was really chilly. Brrrrrrr.

I also headed out one night with Christian to a rockclimbing place in town. It was this insanely busy tiny little gym, with some really great routes. They even let you lead climb, it was awesome. I hadn’t been climbing for a while, but I wasn’t too terrible. I did a couple of nice routes, but backed off a few times before piking on a massively overhanging lead route, it was good practice for backing off on lead at least 🙂

Afterward we had a few beers at the gym (rock!), and then headed to the Oblomov for another. Unfortunately we made a minor timing mistake and I missed the last train back to Böblingen – the train workers at the station thought it was very funny when I asked in bad German “the train didn’t just leave did it”, oops.

But if you’re stuck in Stuttgart overnight there’s not much to do other than go back to the pub, which isn’t all bad! Sometime in the wee hours we headed back to Christian’s apartment, where we needed to break in due to a lack of keys, except we couldn’t manage it – so we ended up waking up his housemate instead, sorry!