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photos to come…

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Brett didn’t leave for work on Saturday and so spent another few hours on the phone to change his flights to this Tuesday. It then looked like that wouldn’t happen either because the boat was waiting on parts. Finally at 9am on Tuesday he got the OK to fly and we immediately left for the airport. He’s now in the far north of Norway getting ready for a five or so week stint in the North Sea.

A few days before he left we headed out to the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart, which was really interesting even for someone who isn’t overly interested in cars. It gave a good history of the company from the independent development of the first motorised vehicles by Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz and Wilhelm Maybach in the late 1800s. The Daimler and Benz companies merged in 1926, when high inflation in Germany and general economic turmoil meant that companies were fighting for survival. It is now the world’s 13th largest car manufacturer in the world. Something I found interesting is that the Mercedes brand was named after the daughter of a rich Austrian businessman, who persuaded the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft to make another race car after a fatal crash in 1900. Sometime later the company’s racing cars became known as “silver bullets”, because one had its paint sanded back to the metal when it was 1kg over racing weight.

Since Brett left I’ve been hanging out with relatives and starting to do some research on health insurance for when we move here. I won’t bore you with too many details but needless to say we don’t fit very well in the nice neat German boxes. And neither do my language skills. I’ve been negotiating most of it in Schwabisch, the dialect of German that I speak, and people tend to think it rather strange that I can speak either English or Schwabisch but not proper German. Apart from my situation there’s really no other reason that would be the case. Anyway, apart from the occasional “you’re really weird” looks and comments everyone has been really helpful and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to pull out some more proper German when I head to a different part of the country.

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Tags: Daimler Museum, Stetten, Stuttgart