A, B, C, E, M, R, S, which is the right class for you?

After going crazy drinking kolsh and buying up all the Haribo sweets we could carry, we moved onto Heidelberg to visit its castle, supposedly one of the best castles in Germany.

The drive to Heidelberg was uneventful enough but getting to the castle was a whole different story. We didn’t want to drive up into the castle as we had read that parking could be a problem. There was a train ride you can take to go up the hill but it wasn’t working the day we were there, so the staff told us to take a bus. However the directions were so bad, we ended up taking it in the wrong direction and spent about an hour being lost. After a lot of grief, we finally drove up to the castle and found parking pretty quick.

Heidelberg, not our expected image of a castle

The castle is one big ruin with an intact façade but we couldn’t enter most of the rooms, you can imagine how bored we quickly got. We did get into the Wine Vat Building that had a Great Cask which is capable of is capable of holding more than 208,000 liters of wine. You can climb to the top of which was quite cool. There was a wedding that night, thus it was fun to see them setting up for it. In all honesty, if we had a tour guide with us or if there were more explanations for the buildings, it would have been a lot more interesting, however as it is, the place was really a bit of a bore.

Giant wine vat

After that disappointment that was Heidelberg, we headed to Stuttgart, home of Mercedes and Porsche. We had originally wanted to visit the Mercedes factory but they couldn’t fit us in and thus they offered us a tour of the Mercedes museum instead which we took up. There is a Porsche museum in Stuttgart but we gave it a miss as CS wanted to co-drive the Porsche on a test track in Leipzig. We thought we could do the Porsche tour in Leipzig, though eventually we missed it due to lack of time.

The original Daimler

The Classics

Notice the Singapore Airlines logo?

(apparently they sponsored a London to Sydney rally in 1977!)

There were only 4 people on the tour, us and another elderly couple (can't remember where they were from). The tour was rather informative, and we learnt some interesting facts like how Princess Diana drove a Mercedes 500SL but she gave it up due to public pressure as she was expected to drive a British made car. There was also a secret prototype Mercedes in the courtyard when we were there, but since it was a secret prototype, it was all wrapped up in black plastic and we couldn’t exactly see the shape.

The future, green technology

(or blue efficiency as Mercedes Benz calls it)

Ahead of the times

Race cars

The "secret" prototype

German wantons and noodles at the museum

Other than the exhibits inside, the building itself was also quite remarkable, the interior has a double helix structure to maximize space. They also had a cool fire safety system which generates a 37m high artificial tornado to channel smoke out of the building in the event of a fire. After the tour, we ended the day with a meal at their in-house café which was quite lovely. All in all a rather good way to spend a day. We didn't do much for the rest of the stay in Stuttgart other than relaxing in our lovely jacuzzi in our room :)