02/09/07

Maggy had done all of the organising for me to get to Stuttgart – places to stay and train times. I left Keil at about eleven and arrived in Stuttgart at about seven after changing trains twice. On the second leg of the trip I sat next to a girl called Marie. I was eying her off before we got on the train as she looked pretty cool, she had blonde hair and was wearing a knee length skirt, knee high boots and green glasses (she must have had some sort of top on as well or otherwise I really would have been eyeing her off!). I wanted to walk onto the same carriage as her but a lot of other people did as well so I went into the next one along – it was a good move as there must have been to many people on that carriage and she came and sat next to me. For a while we didn’t say anything, I ate my apple and baguette that Maggy had packed for me (see how nice she is?!) And had a sip of my juice and Marie ate a banana and then sent a message on her phone. It was about here that I was thinking, ‘play it cool Justo, you’ve got heaps of time and she probably doesn’t speak English anyway’. But then a sudden realisation spurred me into action – if I didn’t act soon I could miss my window of opportunity because her next move is likely to be whipping out a book or listening to an pm3 player and one these barricades are erected no conversation can commence. ‘Sprecken Zee English?’And she did! So for the next three hours we chatted about loads of things and she asked questions about me and the stuff that I didn’t – which really highlighted for me that a lot of other people haven’t. She’s a 24 year old Med student who just failed an oral exam and is going back home to Constance for a little while. We swapped email addresses and numbers and she said to look her up if I’m ever going to be in Hamburg again.At Stuttgart I met Kai – an old uni friend of Marks and we went out to a German pub for tea and had a German ravioli type thing with warm potato salad and apple pie – very nice! Kai works for Mercedes Benz deciding if customer s like products and how much they would be prepared to pay for them, at the moment he is working on automatic doors for the 2010 S-class. This sort of thing impressed me greatly and I fired bucket loads of questions about Benz and the German auto industry at him.We then went back to his place in his girlfriends 15 year old Opel Corsa (he rides a new BMW motorbike) and while he made some phone calls I checked out his massive CD and DVD collection. I was really impressed and we and a fair chat about bands and movies before watching a comedy and drinking Mezzer mix (orange/coke) and coke and eating the m and m’s that we picked up on the way. We then watched a couple of ‘Friends’ episodes of which he is a big fan, and then hit the sack.