A Stuttgart Visit

After the busy and exhausting (but good!) start of the week with my Berlin trip and the all-day trainings and meetings the day afterwards, I took the rest of that week (Thursday and Friday) off. On the Friday, my sister also had the day off, and we decided to meet in Stuttgart around lunch time.

We had something to eat and then had a look round for Christmas presents for our friends and family in Yorkshire before deciding that we could actually find what we wanted in Ludwigsburg, too, and would not need to carry it all around with us for the whole afternoon.

For a few months now, a ferris wheel has been standing in front of the Neue Schloss ("new palace") in Stuttgart. It is part of the "The Länd" campaign of the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, aimed at (young) experts from all sorts of industries and professions to make them move here and work in our notoriously understaffed companies. Let's not go into the sense or non-sense of this campaign; it has been widely discussed and criticised here (last but not least because it is monstrously expensive).

Anyway, I knew I wanted to ride on that ferris wheel and look at Stuttgart from a perspective never seen before or after, once the wheel will be gone.

The day had been grey and foggy until we met - and later, we heard that the sun and blue skies were only in Stuttgart and only for a few hours; right on time for our visit, and making for good views from the wheel!

Our next stop was the City Museum with its current exhibition about Wilhelm II, the last king of Wuerttemberg. It's been 100 years since his death in October 2021, and the exhibition shed light on all aspects of his life - public and private, from pets to politics.

Wilhelm in his later years. Ali and Ruby, his dogs, were at least as popular as himself.

A young Wilhelm in fashionable trousers. But the real star of the photo is the little dog!

"The King's darlings congratulate!" One of his courtiers made this as a birthday surprise for Wilhelm.

We both agreed that the exhibition was very interesting and the choice of exhibits good; the presentation itself could have been better in places. Some of the information signs were so low on the wall or even the floor that one had to kneel down to read them - impossible for some visitors. Also, the lighting was such that in places, we could not avoid casting our own shadows across the exhibit or the informative text (or both), and in some instances, there were smaller glass cases at the sides of larger exhibits where you had to squeeze into a tiny space if you wanted to look at them properly. So, yes, it could have been better, but we still did enjoy the exhibition and learned a lot from it.

I have written about Wilhelm before.

It was time for coffee and cake now, and we chose a place opposite the palace with a good view of the ferris wheel. It was lit up by then, and with darkness coming so early this time of year, it really was quite beautiful to look at.

View towards the palace and the wheel from the museum

What I saw from my seat in the café