In This Issue:
Germany

Germany's Cities & Towns

It's Saturday afternoon in a small town in Germany. You are relaxing at an outdoor cafe over a pot of coffee and a respectably complicated wedge of torte, whipped cream on the side goes without saying.

In the carefully maintained medieval town square you congratulate yourself for thinking to bring, and wear, those comfortable walkers. Cobblestones are part of the picture when you go exploring the original cores of Germany's small towns and larger cities. How on earth, you wonder, can the local women not get those stiletto heels get caught between the cobbles?

Then comes a sound from across the square, where market vendors have just finished taking down their stalls. Church bells! Time for vespers maybe, or evening mass, but certainly time to start the weekend. Time to simply be.

Soon the squares will come alive again with locals and visitors dressed for the night out, a nice dinner in a restaurant or wine bar, or just a good time with friends over a pint or two of the local brew.

No other Western country is as decentralized as Germany; towns and cities everywhere yield surprises. The most stalwart big city travellers might want to reconsider and do a small town side tour every once in awhile or risk missing some of Germany's treasures. A few years back, some 4,300 small town museums mounted more than 8,000 special exhibitions, not to mention the 10,000 and more folk festivals and similar events.

Many towns are treasures all their own, Bamberg, for example, a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its original, lovingly kept townscape. Or Landsberg, on the Romantic Road travel route, 65 kilometres west of Munich, on the Lech river, an Alpine tributary to the Danube and home to three noted German hockey players.

Increasingly, visitors are discovering these and similar towns, such as the Pied Piper's Hamelin, in northern Germany, or German poet Goethe's spiritual hometown of Weimar in the east, or historic Cochem on the Moselle river, in western Germany's Riesling country. A perpetual favourite among university students, the town of Tubingen, on the Neckar river, attracts a steady stream of visitors to its medieval core of narrow lanes and steep, half-timbered gables, as does Heidelberg, also on the Neckar, 3.5 million of them, in fact.

In northern Germany, the cities of the former Hanseatic League - Bremen and Hamburg on the North Sea, for example, Lubeck, Rostock and Stralsund on the Baltic coast - offer their own distinctive flair. Built mostly in a style called Brick Gothic, they evoke an era of bustling trade and wealthy seafaring merchants.

Along with its thousands of museums, Germany offers world-famous shopping boulevards, opera houses and concert halls, more castles than museums, more than 300 modern spas and health resorts, excellent golf courses and tens of thousands of well sign-posted hiking and biking trails. Also worth noting, over 300 Michelin stars for gastronomic excellence.

Thanks mostly to history and the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations, the cultural wealth normally associated with the capital in other countries is here spread among a score of cities. Cologne, for example, offers far more than its Gothic cathedral (Germany's most visited tourist attraction) and is known among contemporary art professional as on par with Berlin. Stuttgart and Munich are the places to visit for museums of cars and other things technological. Dresden has an astounding array of rare, antique art treasures, including a city panorama composed entirely of spectacular Baroque buildings.

While guests in Germany's largest cities - Berlin, Hamburg and Munich - can shop to their hearts' content, as one might expect, much smaller Dusseldorf is equally well known for upscale fashion, and Cologne and Frankfurt have pedestrian-zone shopping streets where, at times, the crowds are so dense you better be there the minute the department stores open their doors in the morning.

City-hopping architecture buffs can get their fill easily, especially since Germany's reunification has sent restoration and redevelopment funds to the former East German cities. In Berlin, no visitor should miss Potsdamer Platz, before WWII one of Europe's busiest squares, then a barren no-man's land for the Cold War years and then, Europe's largest construction site for the decade after reunification. Today it is again an urban centre humming with life, with new tower complexes designed by some of the world's leading architects, housing shops, restaurants, clubs and bars, apartments and stunning offices.

Cologne, next door to that trademark cathedral, boasts an underground contemporary concert hall with wood-paneled interiors and acoustics that the world's musicians rave about. Dusseldorf's new K21 modern art gallery houses experimental art from the 1970s to today in a building that is in itself a work of art. A glass dome covers the roofs of this former provincial government complex, creating a huge museum 'piazza' that can accommodate a multitude of arts events and happenings.

And on it goes at every turn. And remember, when it's time for smaller treats, the outdoor cafe, the town square and the Saturday evening bell is never far away in any town in Germany, large or small.

Speak with your Flight Centre travel consultant about planning your next visit to Germany's cities and towns.

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