GPs!
Everytime I hear the word EFFICIENCY in my normal non-cyber life, I have to think of you… saying it in your NZ accent haha!

I agree with you on infrastructure, but the efficiency thing would be more efficient if there were not so many opinions about it! Discussions about “Hartz IV”, “Mindestlohn”, “Agenda 2010″ and “Auslandseinsätze der Bundeswehr” will never end.
And whereas I just dislike beer (I’m a wine drinker) I absolutely hate Karneval/Fasching/Fastnacht. If I was into that I might just go off and cosplay some Anime character. Thanks, but no thanks.

But since you ask me about a top five, I’d pick Japan for more or less obvious reasons.
What are my favorites about Japan?

1. The language has a basic level of politeness that is unsurpassed in the west. Even the wildest offensive terms are harmless if translated by the word; in fact, many Japanese insults work by exaggeration of politeness.

2. People’s faces are not as clenched like a fist as in Germany. Germans tend to have a look on their faces like they wore the weight of the world on their shoulders. (Nagging is a German national trait.)

3. Indigenous Japanese food and drink is better than anything international I have tried so far, with the exception of a well-timed French Camembert.

4. If you’re obviously a foreigner, Japanese libertarians will just talk to you out of curiosity and toss English phrases at you - and conservatives who at first distrustfully think you’re American will be all happy and sunshine once you reveal you’re German.

5. “Book-off” and other second-hand shops will provide the fan with a large variety of cheap popculture products and merchandizing.

Add-on:
6. Low-class apartments (like for students) are usually heated with Kerosine, which is cheap because there’s no tax on it: 50 E heating costs for the whole winter (2LDK).

To get my YouTube-Comments here:
(Enjoying the side-effect of a less strange nickname.)

What I like most about Germany is that we have a name for really everything. So the hard ends of your shoelace is “eine Benadelung” and the term “bürgerliche Dämmerung” describes the intensity of the light in the evening when you are able to see normally when the sun is already under the horizon.

And the thing really best is - of course - “die Gemütlichkeit”. There a two - maybe more, but two are somewhat important - meanings of “gemütlich” and one of them can be translated without loss, so “ein gemütlicher Sessel” would be “a comfortable armchair”. The second meaning of “gemütlich” or “Gemütlichkeit” as a noun is hard to describe. It’s related to that armchair-comfortable but it’s more. It’s like the feeling of sitting in that very armchair, having your friends around, being relaxed and just feeling good.

And another thing: Writing Nouns with capital Letters. It helps you reading a text fast by premarking the important words. An they support the fast disambiguation of words that can be noun and verb or something, although we have less of these than the english (or English?) language.

Well, I got stuck in word nerding… (Hello, Miss V!)

So I will think about something good about Germany - not the german (or German? I’m used to write nouns with capital letters, not adjectives.) language.

Let’s see… I like the german history. And that’s more than 12 years dictatorship of an insane Austrian. Most long-lasting improvements of society come from Germany (this time as a description of cultural identity, which also includes Austria, Liechtenstein and parts of Switzerland). The compulsory education comes from here, the public health insurance and there are other things. The point is that these were not forced through by any revolution, but by evaluating them as best solution.

This is a thing which I think is typical for Germans. We are not rebellious, we are not revolutionary. Every change in Germany is result of a long evolution. The French maybe had run down the Berlin Wall in 1965 with thousands of people dying for it. We managed to trigger this cataclystical change without one person dying.