Stuttgart

We have spent the last week in Stuttgart with Helen and Sam. I think this baby is German! It loves sausage and sauerkraut and pretzels! The Germans certainly know how to make sausage and pretzels, so we are in the right place for it. The beer is apparently very good too, but I'm not letting the baby try beer just yet.

Helen's German is getting very good, and she has been showing us around and ordering in restaurants and finding me bathrooms and explaining to other concerned women that the food is really very good here...

Sam has applied for another year's scholarship in Germany, and I hope for his sake that it goes through and that he can continue his work here. But I hope for Helen's sake that it doesn't go through and that they can come home soon, and for my sake that Helen will be around when I finally have this baby!

Stuttgart itself is a traditional little Schwebian town. That is the name of this regional part of Germany. They have traditional Schwebian foods which are heavily Italian influenced, such as sausage meat wrapped in pasta rather like a large ravioli. They also have a rather unimpressive thing which is like macaroni and cheese which they serve with onion and (of course) sauerkraut. Potato salad is also astonishingly popular and appears beside just about every dish. Pretzels are used instead of bread, and come to the table as soon as you sit down.

My main nutrition at the moment comes from this amazing drink called Apfelschorle which is nothing more than half apple juice and half mineral or soda water. Sounds simple, but the baby loves it, so it is one of the few things I can tolerate - and I'm drinking it by the litre. Interestingly, Germany is very big on recycling, so we save all the bottles and get 30 cents back for each one returned! You really could make a living here collecting bottles, especially around the airport and other tourist places where the foreigners don't know how it works.

The Germans are very compliant with rules, though. I don't know if all the recycling bins would be respected if you tried the same thing in Melbourne. I don't know that people would take the time to work out which of the four bins each item of rubbish needs to go into and to separate them all out. Even inside McDonald's they have a person employed just to go through all the trays and separate out the different types of rubbish - now that would be a fun job!