Mannheim is a cool city. It is right on the Rhine and Neckar rivers, it has 320 000 inhabitants, it's right near everything so that you are only a short train ride from almost anywhere and it's big enough to have anything you need. But it is also far enough away and small enough that you don't feel like you are always fighting for personal space. It is a great place. That said, it is the least 'German' place I have been in Germany. Think of anything that you might see on a postcard of Germany and it is not here. There aren't the small winding streets, the old white houses with the brown wood showing through the walls or massive cathedrals towering over the skyline. According to my resident Mannheim expert, that is for 2 reasons. One is because it was 'Zerbomt' in the 2nd world war. I'll leave it to you to figure out the translation on that one. The other is because in the 1800s sometime, the Prince Regent who lived in the big castle he had built for himself (which is now home to Mannheim University) decided that they should organise the place a bit and divided the city centre into a grid pattern and gave all of the squares an alphanumeric code. Take a look at the map. So while it doesn't have the German feel, it is very well organised and super easy to get around. It also has a lot of very well known residents, such as John Deere, Caterpillar, Unilever, Daimler, Siemens, IBM and so on. BASF (just over the river in Ludwigshafen) alone employs 115 000 people and made a profit of 70 Billion Euro last year, that's $120 689 655 172 at today's conversion rate. It was the birthplace of Steffi Graf and Karl Benz, the founder of Daimler AG and the inventor of the modern motor car. Last year, Forbes magazine named Mannheim as the 11th most progressive city in the world. "Mannheim = Leben, im Quadrat" (Mannheim, life squared). Although there is a lot happening in Mannheim, it hasn't struck me as the best place to bring a school group for an extended period, a day trip would be better. It does have a lot of very nice things, but at the end of the day, so does everywhere in Germany. Essentially, if I'm going to be bringing teenagers to Germany for a few short weeks, to live the most German they can in that time ... Mannheim strikes me as a great place to live, work or go to uni ... but it doesn't seem to be built for this purpose.
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