Leaving on a Jet Plane

We visited the Warner Brothers Studios on a Monday.  On Tuesday, we finished packing up and cleaning our flat, travelled to the Stansted Airport, and caught a plane to Stuttgart, Germany. Overall, our journey to Germany was flawless.  We got to the airport with plenty of time, made it safely on the plane, and found our hotel without any trouble.  It took us 5 months, but we are finally professional travellers ;). 

 (A beautiful cathedral near our hotel)

The whole purpose of our going to Germany was to visit the German Christmas markets, which had been recommended to us many times.  So on Wednesday, we spent almost the entire day visiting two Christmas markets. The first one was a smaller market outside of Stuttgart in a town called Ludwigsburg. While we were there we had a bratwurst (we were in Germany after all) and a steamed bun with vanilla cream and cinnamon over it. The bun looked delicious but tasted mediocre. After the first market we went back to our hotel to put on some more layers, it was a lot colder there than London was. We both ended up with about 5-7 layers plus hats and gloves, but at least we were warmer!

The Stuttgart market was much cooler than the first one. It had a lot more stands with more variety. We spent several hours walking around looking at the 100s of booths. One of the coolest parts was the elaborate Christmas decorations on top of their booths and all the smells of Christmas almonds roasting. The one downer was that these markets were very similar to the two Christmas markets in London (which were based on these German markets), so it wasn't AS cool as it would have been if we'd never seen those before. Overall, we still had a good time and now we can say we've been to Germany.

A model city with train tracks around it

Hand carved and painted toys were a specialty item

We had to get our German pretzel at the end of the night! One of our favorite parts of visiting Europe at Christmas time was seeing all the nativities.