04/09/07

This morning we woke earlier and met Maggy’s uncle at the Mercedes museum. The building is really impressive as were the many cards on display and information. We actually spent about four hours here but it went pretty quickly. I then went with Maggys uncle Udo in his Mercedes E-class wagon back to their place about 25 kms from Stuttgart in a little village although we can’t have gone a minute without being in an urban area. Here I met his wife who only spoke a little English and we had a very nice pretzel and butter with tea. Udo then drove me to a Hugo Boss factory outlet in the near by village Metzingam as this is where the company originated. On the way I asked him about the letters ‘evo’ on a Mercedes Benz in front of us and he thought I was referring to the Italian number plate because Germans pronounce ‘I’s’ as ‘e’s’ when saying the letter. Udo then said ‘if it has an ‘E’ its from Italy and a ‘D’ then its from Germany’ – I thought it was funny… In the Hugo Boss store I looked for some jeans to replace my now repaired ones and found them all to be pretty well priced, but I couldn’t find any that fitted better than my current ones but then I saw some cool brown and black striped pants for only 20 euro so I picked them up and found some undies on the way and was just about to buy them, when I though - I don’t really need these, so I put them back. So it wasn’t a materially fruitful outing but I did get the experience of Hugo Boss for pretty cheap. After a dinner of Schnitzel, Udo’s fourteen year old daughter Anna (who introduced herself to me as Anne only to be corrected by Udo (?)) and I and there lab/German Shepard Bella had a walk from a near by hill back to the house. She could speak alright English, but forgot words occasionally, but this didn’t stop her from talking at all, not by a long shot. On the way back it rained solidly again and got dark.Normally one of the first things that you ask someone you meet is ‘what sort of work do you do?’. Turns out I didn’t ask Udo. He’s a singer – yeah cool eh? He is 56 and a really big guy and speaks with a German accent, but sings fantastically in English. He showed me all of the songs on his computer (just the instruments) and then sang along to a couple, Eric Claptons ‘tears in heaven’ and another that I forgot. He’s got a great deep voice. We then chatted until about Midnight in their living room and went to bed. Maggie called to make sure everything was sweet and that I would get on the right train the next day which was very kind of her – her second interview went really well too. That night I slept fantastically even though the mattress on the fold out was really hard and thin.