Kaiserslautern, Germany

 
Today's plan is to try and find the rental car place.  Rent a car and drive towards Metz, France.  I thought this really old building with a cable dish on the balcony looked funny.

A few pictures walking around Kaiserslautern.

I walked over this bridge and saw these small houses down by the train tracks.  It looks to me like this is a slummy part of town, but what really got me was that they had all of these solar panels on top of their houses and garages even though it wasn't necessarily the nicest place to live.

 
Here is a picture of people moving out of an upper level apartment.  I'm sure the stairwells are very narrow, so they are dropping everything down to the ground using a pulley system.

 
Yes, this is how every street looks.  The cars park on the sidewalks and then there is only room for one car to go down the center.  The Germans seem to be amazing drivers as they can get their cars into almost any location and get it back out, even with crowds of people walking there as well!

Okay, so the car rental place wanted to charge me 3 times as much showing up in person as they would have if I would have reserved it an hour before from my hotel.  I decided to stick around K-town and see what else I could explore today.  One of Brandon's coworkers with was going to take us to this fountain the night before, but we all decided to call it a night instead.  It's quite an integrate fountain and really cool to see.  I'm sure the kiddos would love running through this!  This one is called The Emperor Fountain.

 
Here is another fountain a little closer to our hotel.  There are a lot of fountains in this town.  This fountain is in St. Martin's Square.

This mask statue is outside the New Palantinate Theatre.

Pretty butterflies hung around town in the trees.

The entrance to The Japanese Garden.

 

 

This is a gorgeous place.  It is one of the largest Japanese gardens in Europe.  It was a great place to sit and read a book and enjoy the peaceful setting.  I will return to this next time I'm in K-town 

I'm not sure what this place is, but I thought it was funny that they were rebuilding "ruins".

Another fountain.

This is Schillerplatz, I think.  It was fun to see this street sign after being away from home for so long.  It has the distance to Washington D.C. as 6,869 km.  Of course, there is a fountain in the background as well.....

 

I've seen a few street musicians, but I never expected to see a violin and an accordion.  It was great!