View of Tubingen houses from the river.

Another amazing view of the houses of Tubingen along the river.

Remember me telling you in an earlier blog  that Reutlingen was the quintessential German town? LIES!! Tubingen totally takes the cake. Tubingen is an adorable college town.  It was one of the few places in Germany not destroyed during the war.  All of the medieval aspects of the town are preserved.  It has narrow cobble stones streets that wind around the town.  According to our Professor, Herr Springer, it is super easy to get lost if you don’t know what you are doing.  Veronica, Katy, and I loved Tubingen so much that have been there twice since we got to Germany.  It is just gorgeous! The first time it was rainy and Herr Springer took us on a short tour and told us a little bit of the history of the town.  Herr Springer is our Art History professor and he is pretty awesome!  He lives in Tubingen and has done some pretty interesting things in his lifetime.  He crossed the US from Boston to Los Angeles hitchhiking, and he won a semi-offical race contest on the big water slide of the open-air pool in Tubingen.

Frau Brixner cutting Nate's food. Nate broke his arm and isn't great with utensils.

The same day Herr Springer took us on the tour of Tubingen, we had our first faculty dinner where we met the Brixners for the first time. We all LOVE the Brixners!!! They are our German language professors and are a ton of fun! The Brixners have been with the program since its beginning! Our group is Reutlingen-87, just to give you an idea of how long the Brixners have been with the program.  I have Frau Brixner for my German 101 class and she is a hoot! There are only 4 of us in her class so we all get a lot of personal attention.  The other day she asked me to “springen sie!” which means to jump.  That is the first time a professor has asked me to jump during class.  I wish I knew how to say “how high?” in German.

Graffiti house

Katy, Veronica, and I went back to Tubingen the next weekend when it was warm and sunny.  During our second trip, we ate at this cute little Italian restaurant, and the food was delicious.  After spliting a banana split we continued our walk around the Tubingen and took a ton of pictures! We will definitely be returning again soon!

Mercedes-Benz museum view from the outside.

Professor Szaniszlo took us on a class trip to Stuggart, capital of Baden-Württemberg.  When we arrived we took a tour of the Mercedes-Benz museum.  The beginning of the movie Get Smart with Ann Hathaway and Steve Carell pretty much exemplifies the atmosphere of the Mercedes-Benz museum.  When I walked into the state-of-the-art facility I seriously thought I had become a secret agent and was entering headquarters.  It was SWEET!!!  It was probably the coolest museum that I have ever been to.  The museum was modeled after Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York and was finished in 2006.  The entire building is state-of-the-art; every building material is top-of-the-line, even down to the cement which has a higher concentration of cement than the normal stuff making the walls feel like marble.  Pretentious much?…I think so! Our tour guide dressed like a secret agent and took us to the top floor using a futuristic looking elevator where the walls were lined with the leather in a Mercedes Benz.  Seriously, look up pretentious in the dictionary, you will find Mercedes Benz.

We only had around an hour and forty-five minutes to spend in the museum, and according to the guide one could spend more than forty-two hours in the museum in order to see everything! Crazy, I know, but totally true. Unfortunately, my camera ran out of battery early on during the tour so I didn’t get many pictures, but I took a lot of mental ones! Click!

Futuristic elevator we took to the top floor where we started our tour with our guide, the secret agent.

After the Mercedes Benz tour, we got lunch at the train station and then we were off to take a bus tour of Stuggart.  Our tour had both English and German speaking people so our guide spoke in both languages!  First she would speak in German, and then she would start speaking in English!  I was flabbergasted!  Even though we had an awesome guide, I regrettably suck at bus tours.  I tend to fall asleep within five minutes of the tour; I think it’s a combination of sitting down, the moving bus, and listening to a person with an accent that just puts me straight to sleep. Ask my parents about our trip to Ireland… So, I missed like two-thirds of that tour.  I did wake up just in time to go up in the TV tour.  I don’t remember how tall it was (I was asleep for that part of the tour), but the view was gorgeous. The sun had just come out and you could see for miles. I had to take a mental picture for that part of the tour too.  Click!