Calendars – different in every country (Flickr: Eichental)

Monday was an odd day this week. Firstly, I noticed during breakfast that my girlfriend was still there, smiling across the table at me and drinking tea – which is odd given that she works full-time a good two hundred clicks south of Hamburg. Secondly, when I rang a service hotline trying to sort out some annoying computer issues, I got an even more annoying answering machine telling me that the call center in question was closed.

Doris Kirchhof und Kirsten Sindt © Evgeniya Koptyug

The traffic noises and the cacophony from the building site nearby seem to disappear as I step over the threshold of the stage entrance to the Hamburg State Opera. My feelings are a mixture of Christmas and birthday-like excited anticipation. A childhood dream is coming true: I am visiting the costume department of an internationally famous opera house. It’s hard not to squeal with delight as the afternoon goes by. I do it anyway at some point. Luckily my interviewees react with understanding!

Dockville 2010: Friska Viljor rock the dock! (Photo: Nicole Runschke)

After last week’s post about how Germany as a country is unexpectedly well-versed when it comes to BBQing, here’s another post about a thing that Germans are great at, but that isn’t really associated with them – yet.

And that thing is: festivals. Now, when people hear the word festival, they tend to think immediately of Woodstock (USA), Glastonbury (UK) or maybe – if you like your peace-and-love a little more recherché – Roskilde in Denmark. What a growing number of people across Europe are starting to associate with the term, however, are names like Watten, Hurricane, and Melt - some of the continent’s biggest festivals and all of them taking place in Germany.

A "climate capsule" outside the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Image: MKG)

If there’s one thing Germany is good at apart from beer (and there are a few things), it’s museums. They might not be free like in the UK, but they are often of exceptional quality. After all, Germans take education, or Bildung as it is reverently referred to, very seriously, and museum visits are considered indispensable in acquiring it. That’s why Germany has a course of study at University level called Museumspädagogik, or “museum education,” offering training on how to bring visitors closer to the works they come into contact with.

The center of Hamburg in the summer sun (Flickr photo: Mark Max Henckel)

Apart from its reputation for beautiful blond Nordic girls and debauched nightlife, one of the main reasons I moved to Hamburg is the fact that it is, in my view, one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. And I’m not alone in holding that opinion, as any visitor to Hamburg will soon realize simply by turning on the radio: all local radio stations greet listeners with something akin to the following phrase: “Wir senden live aus Hamburg, schönster Stadt der Welt!” – We’re broadcasting live from Hamburg, the most beautiful city in the world!”

Now, I think you probably have to actually have been born in Hamburg to go quite as far as to claim it is the most attractive urban settlement on the entire planet. I mean, come on guys, ever heard of St. Petersburg? Stockholm? Venice?

Bikes in Hamburg (Flickr: rbrtsch)

As any of you reading from north of an imaginary line drawn between Cologne and Berlin will agree, Germany is often remarkably flat. The northern half of it is essentially part of a pancake that geographers call “The North European Plain.” To the likes of you and me, this essentially means that, between Holland and Russia, you can get a great view just by climbing up the average drainpipe. On a bungalow. With a low roof.

World Cup 2006 in Berlin (Flickr: SpreePIX-Berlin)

Germans don’t do things by halves, especially where football is concerned. The “beautiful game” is something of a religion out here, and this makes the World Cup roughly equivalent to the Second Coming, or the Day of Reckoning – or whichever bit of biblical imagery you fancy. Anyone who experienced the 2006 World Cup in Germany certainly knows what I’m talking about.

And whether it’s just a fleeting football competition or Doomsday itself, Germans like to make sure that they decorate accordingly. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since we’re talking about the country that invented Christmas trees and, as far as I know, the only country where a majority of houses decorate for Easter. In short: if you’re talking religions and decorating, you’re talking German.