This Sunday, Germany goes to the polls and, to be honest, it’s quite difficult to believe. In fact, I don’t really think most Germans have got their heads round it at all; the government out here seems to have handled the recession well, what few policy discussions there are seem to run along relatively uncontroversial, un-ideological lines, and everyone is pretty convinced that Angela Merkel will remain chancellor at the end of it anyway.

In fact, if it weren’t for the hundreds of thousands of political posters crowding streets and billboards all across the sixteen federal states, you might be forgiven for thinking that even the politicians have forgotten the election.

Hamburg Speicherstadt. Flickr (CC) Manfred Hartmann

I arrived yesterday and checked in a 0.5 star hotel, the nearest and cheapest one that I can afford near the train station. As they say, you get what you pay for. I didn’t expect five-star hotel accommodation. To begin with, I heard sirens when I made my reservation via phone. I did not expect that it is the same sound that would greet me as I cross the street to my hotel and that I would hear for the rest of the night. I heard somewhere that there was a demonstration last night. It must be that, or the police station and hospital is really near my hotel. The street that faces my window must be the route that connects the police station and the hospital to the rest of the city. If not sirens, it’s some shouting from across the street or the zooming of cars passing by that keeps me shifting from neverland and Hamburg. Is it for this reason they say  ‘sleep sound’?

Kiechlingsbergen. Photo: Flickr/kvd/nicke eisen

Acres and acres of green grape fields surrounded by, and snaking up, quaint little hills.  Half-timber houses lining narrow streets.  High wooden doors hiding courtyards from the street where an old woman waters her potted plants, romantically crumbling stone walls, a little castle, a perfect blue lake.  Is this heaven?  No, no, just small-town German in the middle of wine country.

We’d driven down to Kiechlinsbergen for a house-warming party, friends of friends living in the country and working at an organic farm, living in a cottage with a terrace and garden roofed with ripening grape plants and facing the neatly rowed, brilliant green fields and the red-orange roofs that fill the tiny valley that houses wine makers and farmers and people looking to get away from city life.