Official language: German
Capital: Berlin
Currency: Euro
Population as % of total EU: 16
Joined EU: 1958

Did you know?

• German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, popularly known for their compendium of fairy tales, also wrote the first comprehensive German dictionary (the Deutsches Wörterbuch). They began it in 1838, but it was only published in 1854 and properly completed in 1961.
• The German word for ‘tomcat’, kater, also means ‘hangover’.
• German is the most widely spoken mother tongue in the EU (followed closely by Italian and English). Germany also has the largest population in the EU, although recent studies suggest it is in decline.
• Germany has relatively strict laws on what babies can be named. The name must clearly indicate the gender of the baby, and it must not be absurd or degrading (i.e. it cannot negatively impact on the child). Surnames, product names or names of objects are also prohibited. The final decision on whether a name is admissible lies with the local registry office (Standesamt).
• Aachen, Regensburg, Frankfurt-am-Main, Nuremberg, Berlin, Weimar and Bonn have all, at some point, been the capital city of Germany. Berlin regained the title after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990. However, the seat of the government only completed the move from Bonn to Berlin in 1999.

Visiting Germany: a selection of recollections

After Italy, Germany is the European country I’ve visited the most. I don’t remember ever consciously deciding upon it as a place to explore, but a mix of convenience and coincidence have kept pulling me back.

My family have always had several German family friends and in my late teens, unable to resist a quick trip with a free place to stay, I made several trips over. Then two of my university flatmates moved to Berlin for a year abroad (where, conveniently, they got to know the man that is now my boyfriend). Then I found myself working for a radio station that asked me to cover the Berlinale for a couple of years running. As a result, I have a range of memories from across the country – from the sentimental to the bizarre.

One that stands out is the night of my twenty-first birthday. I spent it with two of my best friends in Berlin, on a wine-fuelled quest to find a friend of a friend of a friend’s house party. The evening is a blur of rail-replacement trams, birthday mood swings and nostalgic reminiscences.

Although we found the party in the end, it took far longer than it should have done and we did end up getting pursued by dogs (albeit briefly – a story for another day).  We tried to ‘borrow’ bikes chained up in a courtyard, ambitiously thinking we could lead our own ‘night tour of the city’. We met new people, watched Israeli live music in someone’s lounge and giggled our way through to the small hours.

Making our way back home, starving, we launched ourselves onto a fast food establishment. It was advertising halloumi or falafel in pitta, but we negotiated with the proprietor for what we really wanted: halloumi and falafel. Bemused, he kindly obliged. This may still be my best birthday meal, ever.

Many of my trips to Germany are made of tales like this – moments that mean relatively little on their own, but which stay in the memory and which I still treasure years later. Really, I’ve actually done precious little in the way of German ‘tourism’.

What, then, would I say are my presiding feelings about Germany? That it’s a place where it’s easy to feel comfortable, where friends and friends of friends and family of friends will welcome you into their homes. Where you can holiday without worrying too much about taking in all the sights and which is permeated by an irresistible creative culture.

With this in mind, I would like to round this entry off with a selection of recollections from my trips to Germany – some embarrassing, some unusual and all, for the most part, highly enjoyable. I hope they bring a smile to your face, and encourage you to go and make some memories of your own.

• Meeting and interviewing Udo Kier in a hotel room in a skyscraper looking over central Berlin. The interview was about a very baffling film (Keyhole), but the man turned out to be even stranger than the movie.
• Taking a bus over the Dutch/German border, forgetting to get off and ending up back in the Netherlands.
• Drinking water ‘filtered through gold’ at a film premiere in the Canadian embassy in Berlin. The film, War Witch, centred on child soldiers in sub-Saharan Africa and was totally out of keeping with the surroundings. It remains one of my favourite films and I’d encourage everyone to seek it out.
• One evening on a work trip, meeting up with some friends of a friend in a bar. In my keenness to be liked, giving a Swedish lady the wrong idea and accidentally inviting her back to my hotel room (a twin room, shared with a co-worker). Cringing massively as I had to explain my mistake to her.
• Trying on dirndls in a traditional dress shop in Munich, being paraded up and down in front of a crowd of strangers for judgement.
• Leaving a club in Cologne in the early hours of the morning and playing a variant of poker with scavenged bottle caps under the nascent sunrise as we waited for the first tram of the day. Buying fresh pastries from the bakery when it opened, almost missing the tram.
• Geeking out at the Arithmeum in Bonn.

Any questions? Feel free to send them my way. Otherwise, there remains only one thing to say: bis zum nächsten Mal, Deutschland.