You may be surprised that being a German site we make our country the subject of an article, but now we have more foreign visitors than German ones, for example over 25 per cent from North America. They could be interested in our not quite uncritical view on our country. After all, our motor vehicle industry is among the most respected in the world.
Germany is a beautiful country. The Germans have changed, they are now seen in a different light in other countries. Although earlier they were the tiresome, rather self-opinionated and sometimes even dreaded neighbours, today one can certainly imagine to have a party with them. Probably, now you can find more people sitting outside in a street café in Germany than in France.
Meanwhile, even the service has improved significantly in Germany. For many years, contacts with customers were regarded as rather unpleasant encounters, e.g. in the area of technology, especially when it came to female customers. They were often simply not taken seriously. There is a system in Germany. For instance, if you consult a craftsman, you can almost be sure there will be no open-ended decision.
It would be convenient if the craftsman could give his customer two solutions to choose from. Changing something in the decision of the craftsman and still keeping him for the job - that requires quite a lot of stamina and expertise. Of course, in such a case, there are no bad solutions, but it still does not feel comfortable.
For example, the German has his dearest child. No, I don't mean the car, although it is also a favourite, but rather the young people. The older people build or rebuild. I believe that we have not only very good cars, but 'incidentally' probably also the highest building standards in the world. Not only for luxury villas, but also for the average house that also is no longer quite so cheap. Sometimes there are even small fortunes put into the houses.
And because in this country nothing is good enough, we want our homes to be not only very durable, but soon also super heat-insulated. Nevertheless, this is still controversial, because there is no certainty whether this is always good for the house. What is typical about it is that here almost nothing is good enough. Everything can be possibly even better, which of course also applies to cars.
Yet Germany is a beautiful country. Just take a look at our landscapes, but please not while going with an ICE train or while driving furiously fast on a motorway. Visit small villages, go to the Central Uplands or to the islands. If you are from North America, you will perceive our country as cramped. But on the other hand, there are no abandoned industries here, at most only a few in the east.
Here every county makes the effort to become recognizable by a putting a brown sign for each tourist attraction on the motorway. So the typical features are brought to light for the benefit of tourism. Let us take an example of our city - Düren. After enormous destruction in World War II, its northern part was devastated by strip mining of brown coal. As a consequence, there was this typical idea, to not backfill the pits, but to let them become lakes.
At the same time, we have already nature in abundance on the other side of the town. Here, a really attractive landscape has been arrayed in a formerly very poor area. It extends to the volcanoes in the south and to the wetlands in the west to the High Fens in Belgium. Moreover we are part of the Rhineland. Rhineland that is still very proud of its carnival tradition, even if some people use the carnival holidays to go on a short vacation to other regions. 10/12