Deutschland,Deutschl and uber alles. Or is it?

The bus and taxi drivers all seemed to be so tired and weary! Why was that? The bus seats were rock hard, too. I think our public transport system is far better than theirs in every way.

They have this thing with the traffic lights where it goes green for cars at the same time as the green man shows. The cars have to give way to the pedestrians. The pedestrians have to keep their fingers crossed that the drivers know about it. Apparently it keeps the traffic flowing better. Weird.

The housing stock in Berlin, where we were most of the time, was miserable looking apartment blocks, one after the other, with shops at ground level.

And the TV tower in Alexanderplatz isn't as high as the Shard. And the view is nothing like as good as London.

Sorry. Didn't think a lot of Berlin. Well, we did raze it to the ground in the war. That is a shame. The few historical buildings they do have left are lovely. And they have made a good job of rebuilding the ones they lost.

Weather was warm and sunny, whilst it was chucking it down over here. That was good.

On the plus side I think they have a better work/life balance. Shops are not open 24/7 so shopping is not the weekend "hobby" it has become in the UK. On the minus side their loo paper still feels like recycled egg boxes. I do like their shoes and clothes and the way they can have an open air festival or market with beer for all but no drunken louts to make them a no go area for families wirh children.

And we are very polite. We say sorry all the time, even when people bang into us. Not saying Germans aren't polite, but .... We are quite possibly the best in the world

'They drive much better than us'. What does that mean, exactly?

Rugby? I've never heard of any German expertise in that!

On a lighter note, we are certainly much better a queuing !

I have a friend who lives in Berlin and she assures me it is no better or worse than here in terms of services, jobs, getting a plumber or similar out in an emergency etc. Her daughter and SIL work very long hours with less annual leave than they would have in the UK. The education sysyem seems to be just as much of a mishmash with competition to get children into 'good' schools and the same tricks going on to do so. Private schools are flourishing there amongst ordinary families so the state system is obviously not perfect. So I think it probably depends on your stage of life, whereabouts in Germany you are, and what your priorities are, but on the whole not much different.

Rather a generalisation I think.

It's like any other country, you don't really know what it is like until you live and work there, then all the problems start to show.

Sadly, we British are not very good at being patriotic or maybe we are becoming afraid to be so.

Forgive the predictive text in the title.