The Arttours Tour: a walk with Amy in Stuttgart and London

So I'll begin with the news. I heard back from Sabine at Turmforum about the tour of S21: they won't budge on the price of €30 for a tour. I then got talking to the anti-S21 people and explained my situation. They were very approachable and one of them, Mark, offered to give me a free tour on Saturday. So now I have my S21 tour taken care of. Perfect! 

Today's tour was one organised by my hosts Arttours, and it was called A Walk With Amy. Like my tour of Weissenhof yesterday, this was another personal tour. The difference was it was a 'remote' tour, which I'll get to in a moment.

I was told to arrive at Marienplatz where the tour would begin. I found Susanne Kudielka co-director of Arttours, with young daughter in tow, and a journalist Haike from the city newspaper. It started in a relaxed way with a short wait and then I was was invited to walk to the centre of the square and await a call. When it came I found myself talking to a woman named Amy Sharrocks who explained we would take a walk together. 

We set off and negotiated our way around our respective environments, me in Stuttgart and her, I don't know where. We made an agreement not to mention place names but instead to focus upon what we saw, to describe it and decide where we went.

Our journeys had both parallels and points of departure. The experience brought many things into greater focus as they were contrasted with another environment. This statue of a beggar in the front window of an insurance company was one such thing I noticed.

Sometimes we'd wait at traffic lights together and then cross at the same time. Waiting at this red light I remember talking about the myth that Germans always wait for the lights to change, even when the road is quiet. Well here in Stuttgart I see plenty of people of all ages crossing on red and taking a much more practical approach. As this is a car city the lights are sometimes timed so much in favour of the car that you'd be a fool not to just walk when there's a lull in traffic. 

This somewhat putrid green statue of a cat was another one of those beautiful, random creatures that strayed into our conversation. After about 20 minutes of this I found myself back on Marienplatz having been half conscious of this other space, most probably in the UK, that sounded a good bit grittier than Stuttgart, with its forecourts littered with spilled cement.

Finally I have been doing more preparations for my Tour of All Tours, nailing down my route and making it as short as possible so that there is time to talk about the various tours. One of the challenges is finding ways to incorporate the tours that take place outside the city centre into my tour. One solution is to stop at the U-bahn station and indicate that one of the tours begins there with the train which must be taken to get to the site. Other varieties of links are slowly coming but there is still much research to do and this is multiplied if I am to try and offer the tour in two directions so a German and English group may take it simultaneously and cross rather than follow one another. As I want to make each tour work as a journey rather as a set of points (like the bus tour was) this means making each direction somewhat different but complimentary.    

The Weissenhof Estate Tour: modern architecture on show

So the Stuttgart 21 saga continues. I got a reply to my request for a tour and they said they can indeed offer one but they want €30. The other tours I have taken have cost at most €6 so this is five times the price of any normal tour. I wonder if that offers a clue to how they operate more generally.

I also noticed that the anti-S21 people have an information tent opposite the station. I have written to the official S21 people saying if they don't lower their price I'll ask the anti-S21 people for a tour instead. It's a cheeky email, I know, but I am not paying €30 just to hear their publicity so they will have to come down in price. I'll report back on what they say and how it goes with the anti-tour. 

I also noticed a couple of funny things about the train station and the redevelopment. The first is about the station. There seems a great effort made in stressing what a wonderfully designed station it is and yet, if it is such a gem, why did was it make as a station that the trains back in and out of and not one which trains can pass through in two directions? It's a pretty major drawback. Hindsight is a wonderful thing of course. What is more amusing about the S21 project is the company that came up with the initial plans for the redevelopment back in the 90s. They saw the opportunity of burying the train tracks to release a lot of land for prime site building. Their name? Trojan! I am not making this up, they are seriously called Trojan. Enough said.

This afternoon I took the U bahn to the Weissenhof Estate which offers guided tours daily. It is an architecturally significant set of buildings put up in 1927 that includes two Le Corbusier designed houses and several other very modern dwellings. Like at the Kunst Museum they usually give their tours in German but as I was the only person there my guide, Lilo, gave the tour in English. The tour was concentrated upon the architecture and we had a good look around the museum building which was one of the Le Corbusier designed houses. It was definitely done with great style and featured many attractive elements. At the same time I can also see how it required a bit of adapting to become comfortable: the photographs of previous tenants use of it showed it inhabited in unintended ways that modular man would not be proud of. 

We then took a tour of the estate and looked at some of the other buildings from the outside, as they were not open to the public but instead lived in by civil servants. The houses were diverse in design, some rather brutal and others more elegant and sought after. The commentary was interesting and invited many questions. I even got talking about the Tour of All Tours and so got to ask about guiding more generally. When we were just about finished we passed one of the buildings and saw the owner and a friend of Lilo's sitting out the front in the sun drinking coffee. The owner said hello and invited us inside to look around, which was very generous I thought. She was a lively older Dutch woman who clearly liked the unusual house and was happy to point out its features. This place looked like a real lived in home and it was not surprising to learn that she and her husband had been there 31 years.

I don't know if its the time of year and there are very few tourists or if it is commonly like this but I am getting to quite enjoy going on these guided tours as the sole visitor. You have a good opportunity to ask questions and lead the conversation in directions you're interested in yet at the same time there is enough of a script and schedule that there is no awkwardness.  

The Japanese and Gay Tours

I finally stumbled upon a group of Japanese tourists today, so I immediately decided to follow them and see how they made their way around the city.

It was not so spectacularly different from the other groups I've seen, to be perfectly honest. They stopped at the historical points of interest where their guide, a Japanese woman, talked about the site while they took some pictures. They were 50+ in age and spent maybe 4 or 5 minutes at each spot at most. They finally made their way to their coach, parked at Karlsplatz, and drove off. The only fun thing about watching them, in fact, was managing to follow their group and take a few pictures, without being spotted. 

When the Japanese group drove off, a British coach rolled up in their place; a Shearing's Grand Tourer with a sign on the front window, Beautiful Bavaria All Inclusive. The Brits filed out, lit cigarettes and milled about. They didn't get a guided tour, for them Stuttgart was a cigarette break and 40-minute shopping opportunity on their way home from Munich. Checking Shearing's schedule, the only time they come to Stuttgart as a destination in itself is in Winter for the Christmas Markets Tour. 

I then followed a quite different tour: the gay tour of Stuttgart. I extrapolated this this from a website that shows the Homo Map of the city. I never thought it would be so easy to find this route but then I realised that the gay community is maybe a bit ahead of the game in being conscious of itself as a community, and this makes it easier for gay visitors to enter. 

I started with the gay bookshop and then went to the gay friendly cafe, which just looked like any other cafe. I then started to imagine that this was the itinerary of a real person who had arrived in the city and having first dropped into the bookstore, had a coffee in the cafe and  was starting to think of the evening's distractions.

Next stop Kings Club, Stuttgart's oldest gay and lesbian nightclub, 35 year and still going strong. But lets say it was not a good evening there. 

So round the corner to Blue Box which says it is "more than a cinema". With rooms to rent by the hour I should imagine it certainly is.

Finally our weary gay traveller finishes at the Steigenberger Graf Zeppelin, a good-quality gay friendly hotel opposite the station. While it seemed odd to make this tour in a documentary manner, I rather suspect that some people have genuinely been on a similar tour.

finding myself beside the rail station I wanted to check out the anti-S21 protests that are a regular Monday affair. This week I saw more police than protesters. Just a few die hards with placards like this lady. I think most other people have more or less resigned themselves to it happening.

Finally I noticed something interesting in the station itself. It was a traditional clothing stall. I resisted the temptation to rush over to it and buy Lederhosen and instead noticed how Cannstatter Volksfest (second only to the Oktoberfest as a popular German festival) was represented on the top of the stall through its logo. I have been wondering how can I talk about all these things that are not actually in the city-centre but which are nonetheless important. I realised that these representations of the sites in the suburbs could prove very useful. Indeed, for similar reasons to those I face, representing the scattered attractions of Stuttgart, the city seems to have a lot of pictures and logos of its sites displayed in various places that are used in lieu of the sites themselves. The tour bus, for example, has photos of its main destinations printed large on the side of the bus and the TV tower is replicated widely too. This says something about the efforts of the city to commodify itself, which is quite definitely one part of what I see, though far from the whole story.

The Wilhelma Tour: educational botany in Stuttgart

Today the weather finally turned warm so I and half of the city, it seemed, went to Wilhelma, Stuttgart's zoo and botanical garden. 

There was quite a queue but then again this is one of the city's main attractions, bettered only by the Mercedes Benz Museum on the tourist to do list.

My guide on this tour was Michael. There were about 15 of us who followed him and he spoke in German so I observed more the mechanics of this tour rather than following the content closely. He was friendly but still serious in tone, kind of like a science teacher I had in the early 80s, beard and all. He spoke for as much as 7 or 8 minutes at a go and only made one joke in the 45 minutes I followed him. This seemed rather slow, also like the early 80s .

There were about 15 of us in the group and there were two children. He made a point of connecting with the children from the start by asking them questions in order to warm up the group as a whole. He had clearly done this before. It worked, it turned many of the adults into kids too, following their kind teacher around the park.

We spent some time on the architecture and history of Wilhelma, moved onto the plants and then arrived at the monkeys. He had the habit of always talking in front of an empty cage about an animal that might appear at any moment but never did. This would have been fine but while he was talking about the invisible gorilla, two chimpanzees were raising a storm in the next cage which sort of stole his glory. While this was not so ideal on this tour it is the sort of thing that I might be able to borrow and use deliberately. After a while I felt I had got the best out of this tour and so I left them to it.

I took these pictures of the different monkey buildings in anticipation of a visit I will make in the next day or two to Weissenhof Estate where they run daily tours. The buildings look strangely similar...

Finally I couldn't go to the Wilhelma and not take at least one bona fide tourist picture. So here it is: penguins.