Interrailing - Day 4: Karlsruhe

After a long night the Previous Day, we unfortunately overslept, making infeasible our original plans of visiting the nearby(ish) town of Baden Baden and the edge of the Black Forest. Our host suggested we instead visit a more nearby forest, which also happened to have a weird unstaffed safari/zoo type thing. We hopped on a tram to the centre, and walked over the public bridge that goes over the paid zoo, thinking that one could quite easily jump off the bridge to get in for free.

We then made a quick stop at a cute-looking (but very expensive) cafe, getting a sticky rice cake and "100% mango" cake as brunch, before stopping at a supermarket for a cold drink. The heat at this point was extremely intense, so while the frequent shopping stops were a nice opportunity to try some local treats, they were also effectively necessary.

A 30 minute walk later in the blazing sun (we got lost), we arrived in the forest south of Karlsruhe. The shade was a welcome break from the sun, and it was nicely paved and signposted. The forest had a tierpark inside, which I can only describe as a public, unstaffed zoo. There were various paths with animal enclosures that you could walk past and look in for free. People clearly came to maintain it, but there were none around when we went. Some of the animals were sheltering from the sun, but there were still quite a few around! It seemed like there was a focus on deer-like animals, but also signs about the local birds that you could see in the area.

It was getting late, and we were getting hungry, so we headed back, stopping at a Lidl along the way. We found the incredibly tightly vacuum sealed ready meal pasta very off-putting.

For a proper dinner, we were able to go to the KIT University Canteen as our host had a student ID. For dinner, rather than doing a specific meal, they just re-served any leftovers, which unfortunately didn't leave many strong vegan options. We ended up eating various permutations of kofta-adjacent meat, homemade gnocchi, tomato sauce, steamed vegetables, and Chinese-style noodles. It was all quite tasty, but nothing super special, and unusually, priced by weight, despite the dinner lady giving somewhat inconsistent portion sizes. They also had presumably-homemade chocolate mousse for only 80 cents, which was pretty tasty. We had our final bottle of Spezi, a really tasty German drink consisting of a mixture of cola and orange soda. It's one of those generic drinks that multiple different brands sell (think Coke vs Pepsi), but our favourite overall was the Paulaner Spezi. The best part is that it was really cheap – a bottle would only set you back about €1.30, give or take a bit for the deposit.

We then went back home for an hour or so, where our host (I realise that anonymising them in this way does lead to slightly awkward prose, sorry about that, but you never know what sick freaks are reading the Brister Mitten blog) treated us to some amazing homemade Vietnamese Coffee, made with condensed coconut milk!

After resting a bit, we headed out again to visit the SCHLOSSLICHTSPIELE, or "Palace Light Festival". Every year, Karlsruhe Palace has competing digital visual art projected onto it, and we were lucky enough to have the timings line up! The show started with an amusing tribute to the local firefighters, where the real firefighters ran into the building and then the digital versions of them put out fires. Then, the main event began, which had 3 entries from various digital artists around the world, with the viewers voting on the best one. I can't really go into loads of detail about all of them, but I've attached a video that has most of the highlights if you're interested! One really cool detail is that apparently the artists were provided with a 3D model of the palace as a canvas – and so they could use the topology of the building much more than a lot of projection shows do.

This was a really lovely evening, we bought an 8 euro 3L box of white wine and drank it among all of us throughout the night, sharing snacks and conversation with our host and his flatmates and friends. At about 11pm we finally headed back due to an early train the next morning, and fell asleep very happy and satisfied :)

Thoughts of Karlsruhe

Since this is our last day, I'll also give my overall reviews of our experience in Karlsruhe. All in all, it was a really nice place to visit. There was some cool architecture and parks, a couple nice museums, and some pretty neighbouring areas, that we would totally revisit as we couldn't see it all in the time we had. There's a lot of nice local shops, everything is fairly cheap due to it being a student town, and it's well connected by public transport.

The only real caveat I would give is that the experience likely would've been much less interesting without an experienced guide. Obviously, you can say this about most places, but things like visiting a park and museum aren't always inherently stand-outs. Originally we had planned to do many more day trips to the surrounding areas, which we probably would've ended up doing due to not knowing all the good spots in the same way – since Karlsruhe isn't a super popular tourist spot.

However, we'd all still love to revisit at some point in the future, and overall have no complaints!