Germany - Green areas, famous cities and barbecue

As I am German, grew up in Germany and spent the most time of my live there I will dedicate this post to my home country and show some nice pictures. Well I grew up in Gera, a 100,000 inhabitants city in East-Thuringia in the former easter part of Germany. Its about 250km southern from our famous capitol Berlin. As a big part of the industry in this town did not survive after the German reunion many people left the city to find work in other places and so there’s not so much going on. But some of my friends that I know for a really long time are still living there. OK, six years ago I started to study Ilmenau in the middle of Thuringia and actually in the middle of Germany as well. Well there are about 40,000 people living and 7,000 of them are students but except of a few student clubs there is actually nothing going on at night. And as university is a technical one and the female rate there was about 25% I usually did not spend my weekends there and preferred to go out in my home town. Ilmenau is located at the beginning of the Thuringian Forest, a green highland. So the landscape is really beautiful. Unfortunately it is raining a lot as well, that’s what Ilmenau is famous as well besides its university and the fact that the poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote a famous poem there. But in winter as there is so many snow in the highlands its really amazing. You can do winter sports if you like, make walks in the snow, enjoy the landscape or try to make your way by car when it snowed recently. This can be funny sometimes, sometimes annoying. Yeah five years ago my parents also decided not to live in a relatively small flat anymore and moved to a house in a village called Bad Klosterlausnitz 25 km away from Gera. It is really small but it is located in a really green area with a lot of forests which is really cool for biking or if you like walking as well. And it is very close to the nice garden of my grandfather which is very popular for barbecue parties in the summer time. Especially the region I come from is famous for its tasty sausages, the “Thüringer Rostbratwürste”. But the steaks are very delicious as well. So I am looking forward to have a barbecue there again during the next time I am going to Germany. Besides this nice green area where I was living in Germany there are also very beautiful cities in Eastern Germany. Everybody might know the capitol Berlin with its famous sights like the Brandenburger Tor or the Siegessäule, which are also good for a cool picture at night. But cities like Leipzig, Dresden, which is also known as the Florence of the Elbe or Erfurt have really lovely citiy centres and a lot of beatiful and historical buildings.