Ludwigsburg

Right now I'm staying in a small city outside of Stuttgart called Ludwigsburg. It's named after King Ludwig, who was kinda nuts and built a huge palace here modeled after Versailles and used to have salt put on the ground so that he could drive his sled when there wasn't any snow.

But the palace is pretty darn cool. During the tour we walked 1.5 km through the halls from room to room. That's nearly a mile without backtracking and we only saw half of the place. Of course, every room was decorated, although not too ostentatiously. It is the main and probably only tourist attraction in Ludwigsburg. The rest of the town is quaint, with a main street lined with little shops and a central plaza with a prostestant church opposite a catholic. This was the Monday after Easter Sunday and there were decorations EVERYWHERE. Easter is a pretty big affair here with colored eggs decorating miniature trees like christmas ornaments or lights. They get a 4-day holiday for it too.

Also in a Ludwigsburg city park, they have some old Roman ruins, mainly the foundation stones of a Roman estate, some stone stellae, a long Roman road, and a little bit of the north Roman wall. The wall used to stretch a very long distance across the northern border of Rome, kind of like the Great Wall of China, but instead of functioning to keep the Mongolian-like Gauls out, it was more to mark their territory.

Later in the day, I went to a historical town called Marbach. It's kept largely in the same appearance it had a few centuries ago with windy uneven stone-paved roads, old village-style half-timber house architecture, and a city wall surrounding it. While walking through, a group of kids playing soccer in the street offered to give us a tour of a section of the wall. The owner of this section of the wall (houses are built into the wall) gives the kids a key so that in good weather they can show tourists in exchange for tips. The wall contained a guard tower with a toilet being just a hole in the outside wall and a deep pit at the base where they keep witches, as translated by holding a crooked finger up to the nose.

In another part of Marlbach there was a retired Mercedes-Benz mechnaic who spoke extremely good English and was restoring what looked like a circa-1900 Chevrolet. He also had a stable converted into a small brewery with a large copper drum for heating and a separate room for fermentation.

Tomorrow I go to Stuttgart.