Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and a very special

guest today. I'm in Germany and I am with Charles Wilson of the German National Tourist Office

who has been working I believe Charles with the, with the organisation, what, for the last

12, 13 years? 12 years, Simon, yes, and it's great to be here with you in Germany as well.

Well, I love Germany. I've been travelling here since 1975, yes, I was very, very young, thank you.

And you've known the place almost as long as me I'm

interested to know what people miss about Germany as I think you will agree

so I'm in Germany has a lot to offer a very diverse country from lakes and

mountains to major cities arts and and cultures. So there's

really something there for everybody, every kind of taste, a wide range of cuisine and also quite a diverse

culture. And where would people start? The obvious one, I guess everyone seems to want to go to Berlin.

That's quite right, Simon. If you ask anybody, they've either been to Berlin or they've been to Munich, Bavaria and so on.

But I'm always an advocate of looking at the second cities. Places like Cologne or where we are today in Essen, have so much to offer.

There are many, many places other than the two big boys that people should be visiting.

And yet people don't know that much about certainly the area we're in the Ruhr.

They might kind of vaguely know it as a kind of post-industrial

area where, well, presumably not much going on.

I believe you could be right to some extent there, Simon, but if anybody's interested in football

and they know about the Bundesliga, they will also appreciate that this region, the rural region, is the heartland of German football.

Virtually every city has a team. Essen, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, you name it, they have a local team.

In terms of access, lots of flights coming in, obviously, but it's also somewhere you can

get to relatively easily by train.

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