what was supposed to be a relaxing weekend in stuttgart...

Didn't exactly happen that way. I'm starting to think that I am incapable of having a relaxing weekend here. So the plan was that Jen was going to visit me, and we were going to stay in the area, see the Mercedes Benz museum, visit a small town nearby, etc. But then we decided that loveparade would be awesome to go to and a once-in-a-lifetime experience. So Jen got here on Friday night, and we went to a bar Troll with my neighbor Tibo and other Erasmus students. Troll is known for their really cheap beer... 4euro for a liter! (This is the equivalent to about 3 'normal' sized beers. Also, a 1L beer at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich was like 8.50euro.)


I also loved how the bar gave us free peanuts, which of course turned into a peanut throwing war...


We also got sparklers, and later found free bread and soup.


The next day we got up at 8am to catch a train to go to duisburg. Unfortunately, the train wasn't running to duisburg because of the festival... shouldn't they be trying to find MORE ways to go there if there is a festival? Anyways we had to take 2 extra regional trains, but on the way we met some others also headed to the loveparade:




Natalie, Mickey, and Denise were all our age and really fun. We stayed with them for the couple hours of walking from the train station to the festival area and then at the main stage, but ended up losing them in the crowd.

However, I did meet some really fun gay guys. This is our conversation:
#1: [something in German]
me: Englisch?
#1:
[one minute later, points to #2]
We're gay.



I was expecting more of a parade than a festival. I guess when the festival was in Berlin it was more of a parade. Either way, we had a great time. I am extremely lucky that I was inside before they stopped letting people and the craziness happened. Mst people inside the festival had no idea about the tragedy until their friends & family contacted them if they were ok.

Here's the main stage at night (before they made the announcement that loveparade was over and david guetta wouldn't be performing):




Around midnight, the festival was over and we began the long, long journey back to the train station. Jen and I ended up going to Dusseldorf, and then Koln (aka Cologne) where we spent the night (I'm not saying "slept" because I didn't sleep a wink). We were deliriously tired and couldn't stop laughing when we saw the weird installations they had in the train station that introduced very attractions in the city... there was a beach installation, several park installations with fake ducks, a zoo installation with stuffed meerkats. There were also creepy mannequins that people moved out of the way so that they could sleep on the grass, lawn chair, etc.

Here are the photos I stole from Jen.