🇩🇪 Germany

I am German myself, born and raised there, even though I left the country some 30 years ago and have lived abroad ever since. That makes this section different from the rest of the site: it is not the outside view of a visitor discovering somewhere new, but the very personal, occasionally opinionated view of someone who grew up in these places, still has family and friends there, and goes back regularly - which comes with its own biases, nostalgia, and the odd axe to grind that a tourist would never bother with.

2026

Leverkusen - not a destination, but a very good place to grow up

23 August 2026·1921 words·10 mins

Leverkusen sits between Cologne and Düsseldorf and gets treated accordingly - as the place you pass on the train, not the place you get off at. Nobody puts it on an itinerary, and I understand why. But growing up there meant a proper football and multi-sport club on your doorstep, a company that funded concert halls and museums for a town its size, and the Bergisches Land a short bike ride to the east. This is what that actually looked like from the inside.

Erlangen - two years in Franconia that never quite left

23 August 2026·1806 words·9 mins

I was not born in Erlangen and I did not stay - I arrived in 1984 to study Computer Science and left again in 1986, two years that were short even by student standards. But a Franconian college town with an army base, a baroque planned quarter, and one of the oldest beer festivals in the world leaves more of a mark than two years should. This is what stuck, and what has quietly changed since.

Cologne - too close to ever be a tourist in

22 August 2026·1908 words·9 mins

I was born and raised in Leverkusen, close enough that Cologne was just ’the next bigger town’ - where you went shopping, and later where I studied and where most of my friends lived. That closeness is exactly why I never did the touristy things. Here is the list I still owe the city, even after knowing it half my life.