Saturday Flea Markets in the Winter

Brad and I went out for our normal Saturday morning routine - the flea market in downtown Stuttgart. We started out taking the train to one end of downtown, where the yarn shop I go to is - I bought some yarn for to make socks with - this being one of my new year's resolutions. You can see a picture of my ongoing yarn work in the right bar, I found this handy link to Ravelry, a cool website where knitters and crocheters can post their work, find other projects, and it has cool tools like the link I added here for tracking progress of projects. It's a great way over time to keep track of all the projects attempted, completed, or - as they call it - hibernating.

After the yarn shop we hopped the train again to the flea market - it's still going on but at a significantly smaller scale than when the weather is nicer. This picture shows the square the market happens in - the rest of the year the whole square behind Brad would be filled with stands, but as you can see there a just a couple at this time of year. The horse statue is in the middle of the square (Charlottesplatz) and the stalls that are there are equally spread around the whole area.

After we shopped for a while, finishing just as we reached the point where we were freezing! (It was in the low 20's yesterday) we went and had lunch at this nice little restaurant just by the square. We've been there a couple times now and the food is really good - and very reasonably priced.

One interesting thing that happened to us on the train is one of the train inspectors came along. The German train system is strange, instead of having to use your ticket to go through a turnstile (like every other train system in the world I've ever used), the German train systems is more on the honor system - you're supposed to buy your tickets, or stamp your multi-ride tickets, and have them when you get on the train. Randomly, train inspectors will come along and you'll have to show your tickets or face a 40 Euro fine (about $55 dollars), payable on the spot. Yesterday we had one of the inspectors come by, I have to admit I had almost forgotten to punch our tickets - thank goodness I remembered at the last minute!