Hmm, beer… (Image: BM)

“Oh God“, I hear you cry, “he’s writing about beer again!” Well, with three of my posts in the last year having beer in the title and my recent post on bottle deposits, you might think the topic has been covered as much as it can.

Yet far from being ashamed, I stand by my record! After all, there’s a good reason I drink so much beer in Germany: it’s the sheer variety, the fizzy excitement of discovering a new brew almost everywhere I go.

Kurze Straße in Düsseldorf

Germans will often tell you that they live in a boring country – even while you’re sat there having a great time in it. They just can’t help themselves; they love complaining. Then again, if there’s one thing Germans like more than complaining, it’s solving the problem they’re complaining about. This is why citizens of the Federal Republic are, in terms of percentage of time spent abroad measured against the whole population, the most travelled nation on earth.

What Germans tend to forget, however, is just how exciting Germany actually is. Sure, its provincial cities often look boring – you won’t find any showy Barcelona-style Gaudi architecture in Düsseldorf, no Coliseum in Cologne – but it is precisely this slightly dull facade that does the trick.