In all fairness I ought to give Germany a bit of break, since I’m not even living there any more. The first time I ever came to Maastricht, where I live now, was back in the heady days of my youth – oh, a good two and half years ago now – when I still thought the Netherlands might be a fun and interesting place to live.

Maastricht, I’ll grant you, is a beautiful old medieval city, on the borders of Holland, Belgium and Germany, with a well-preserved walled town and (naturally) cobbled streets featuring those twiddly little boutiques with designer labels (though, admittedly, H&M has weaseled its way in and now has 3 stores all within 3 blocks of each other.

On my first visit we spent the morning wandering about the old town blathering on about how charming and quaint we thought the place was and how more than happy we were to be able to spend a few days there. Until we made some new friends in a bar – Germans, admittedly, who studied there – who said something to the effect of ‘Are you kidding? It’s small, boring, country and…well…didn’t you notice that all the locals look suspiciously like each other?’

Turns out that as a university town that attracts students from all over western Europe, the Germans tend to stick to the Germans, the Swiss to the Swiss, the Scandinavians to their own and the Dutch to themselves, and none necessarily break out of their national gangs too much.

But as far as first impressions go, as a place to spend a few years studying I thought it looked just as nice as Cambridge, but without quite so many snots.