Articles tagged with "Germany"
Germany suits an unhurried trip unusually well. The distances are short, the trains are frequent and comfortable, the cities are compact, and the things worth seeing are concentrated rather than scattered. The two things worth planning around are the walking surfaces in historic centers and the…
Germany is one of the easier European countries to travel in with a mobility requirement, and its historic sites are among the harder ones. Both are true at once. The modern rail and city transport network is largely step free and staffed assistance is bookable; cathedrals, castles and old towns…
German family research is unusually rewarding and unusually confusing. The records are good and often digitized, but they are held by the parish, the town and the state rather than by one national archive, and the place your family came from may not be in Germany today. Work out the parish and the…
Germany runs on a festival calendar and almost none of it is fixed. The Christmas markets are tied to Advent, Oktoberfest runs from mid September to the first Sunday in October, and Karneval moves with Easter. Only the Day of German Unity stays where it is. This page tells you which season you are…
Almost everything visitors read as German coldness is a different idea of politeness: say what you mean, arrive when you said, and do not make other people absorb your noise. Learn the greeting, learn that a rule is a rule, and the country becomes markedly easier.
German food is regional before it is national: a northern coast kitchen that looks to the sea, a western river kitchen built on wine, a southern kitchen built on pork, dumplings and beer, and an eastern kitchen of its own. The daily pleasure is not the famous dishes but the bakery, the market and…
Germany carries no advice against travel to any part of it and crime levels are comparable to the United Kingdom. What is worth knowing in advance is narrower and more specific: the terrorism assessment, the counterfeit currency warning, the fact that carrying identification is not a legal…
Germany is a country you can see properly without a car. Intercity trains reach almost everywhere worth going, cities run on trams and an underground, and the useful decisions are about which ticket and which station rather than which road. Where a car is genuinely better, the season decides the…
Germany asks you to pack for a city and a mountain on the same trip, often on the same day, and for rain in any month of the year. Two things change what you carry rather than what you wear: the amount of cash and coin the country still runs on, and the documents worth having on you rather than in…
Germany uses the euro and you can buy it before you travel. Two things are worth knowing in advance: Germany runs on more cash than most visitors expect, so a card only trip will meet closed doors, and the advisory carries a specific counterfeit currency warning with a specific consequence.