A Bit Boring - Stuttgart, Oct. 7

Well Stuttgart has been a bit boring, to be honest. Maybe I'm just starting to get worn out after travelling for so long, or maybe the Netherlands has skewed my opinions, but nothing in Stuttgart has been particularly exciting. I spent more time just relaxing today, which has been nice since I think I got a bit worn out trying to see as many places as possible in the Netherlands.

My explorations today consisted of visiting the city center, and the university campus. The city center is another pedestrianized area, but it's not as extensive as I'd hoped. The center is surround by a main road that is basically a highway, which is loud and unpleasant to be near. Thus I found myself keeping closer to the middle to avoid that main road, which seems to be what most other people do too. In fact, I found a city map showing the pedestrianized areas in the middle (orange), and they don't extend out to that main road since no one wants to be there anyways. The pedestrianized area is really just one street through the center, and not a whole lot more.

But it's otherwise a fairly nice city center. The north side has a park area that I imagine could be very popular on sunny days. The buildings have a somewhat modern style, so they felt fairly approachable. There's also a good number of trees planted in the streets, making for a more pleasant area to walk through.

Although the buildings are somewhat modern, there's still a lot of boring gray concrete. It's not as overwhelming as a place like Berlin, but I find some of these buildings to be outright ugly. A lot of these buildings are really flat too, which isn't helping the aesthetics. 

The few areas I've seen outside of the city center are really dead areas, nothing is happening there. Even on my way out of the main station yesterday, there was practically no one around, and this was right next to the main train station! The place I'm staying at is about a mile from the center, and it's difficult to find anyone doing anything. I find this to be odd, because there's loads of buildings around, with both housing and some shops. Where is everyone?

Looking at a map of Stuttgart, it's rather splotchy in which places have been developed. I think that's largely because it's a hilly area, so it's less practical to build on some of the slopes.

There are a lot of houses built on these slopes, and I managed to get a cool night photo of these from my hostel room.

After exploring the city center, I made my way to the university campus with the S-Bahn. There's a route leading directly there from the city, so it's easy to get to. Also, side note: a day pass for the Stuttgart public transit was only 5 euros, whereas other places have usually been 8-10. So it's definitely cheaper to get around here!

And sadly, it seems school here is still not in session here, so it was a pretty dead area too. And that really wasn't helped by the older architecture around here and lack of upkeep on some of the buildings, some of these buildings were actually a bit gross. That's definitely not the case for all buildings here, there were some more modern and clean buildings, and also a lot of nice green spaces throughout the campus. But the older buildings near the center of campus were really not appealing to me.

That's pretty much all I've got on Stuttgart. I haven't been here long, but I don't really care to stay for much longer, so that works out for me! And I'm heading to Switzerland tomorrow! I'm staying with a family friend near Lake Constance, which is about an hour train ride from Zurich, so I'll get to see both the big city and the suburbs. I'm also getting a tour of an ETH research lab on Monday, so that'll be fun! More to come on those, let's just hope I don't have train trouble tomorrow... Take care!