I Came to Germany. Wuppertal wasn't the plan.

When I was twelve years old, sitting in a foreign language classroom in Kampala, I fell in love with a language I'd never spoken. German felt exotic to me then—all the sharp consonants and precision, so different from the Luganda and English I grew up with. My teacher made it sound like a door opening to another world. By the time I finished secondary school and later university, I'd decided: I was going to Germany.

I was not going to simply do a tourist visit. I planned to study and perhaps work there, and who knows —move there eventually? In my mind, there was always a specific image of what that would look like. I imagined Berlin—the city everyone talks about. A creative hub; the place where things happen.

So, I had majored in German studies at the university in Kampala, spent years perfecting my written skills, reading German literature, absorbing the Landeskunde from thousands of miles away. Everything I did was building toward one goal: get to Germany, get to one of the large metropoles, further my studies and perhaps build a life there. It never occurred to me that Germany might have other plans.

Here's what people don't tell you about moving to Germany from Uganda when you come from a working-class family background: it's damn expensive! Universities in the Westfalia area, while they do not charge tuition fees, demand proof of financial stability—a "blocked account" with thousands of euros sitting untouched, just to prove you won't become a burden for the tax payer. My family couldn't afford that. We'd worked hard for everything we had, but we didn't have that kind of capital lying around. So I found a workaround. I came as an au pair.

Doing an an au pair year was practical, unglamorous, but I felt like it was the right thing for me to do before immersing myself into a foreign culture and education system. It would not only provide me with legal entry into the country, it would help me navigate the culture, hone my German skills and give me a soft entry into society.

I was placed with a family in Wuppertal. No, not Berlin or Cologne or Frankfurt - none of the cities I'd been researching about obsessively. It came down to Wuppertal. A name I hadn't heard of before and whose pronunciation I had to make several guesses about.

When I first arrived and saw the landscape—the steep hills, the grey skies, the way the valley seemed to swallow the city whole—I remember thinking: This is temporary. This is just the beginning. I'll do my time here, learn what I need to learn, and then I'll move to a real city; perhaps to Berlin, Frankfurt, or perhaps even the more cozy Mainz?

I wasn't ungrateful to the family. They were kind and gave me a better head start than I could have ever imagined. But this place? It felt like a holding pattern. Like I was waiting for my real life to start somewhere else.

People that move abroad often talk about culture shock in the obvious ways: the food is different, the weather is different, people drive on the other side of the road. But the real culture shock—the kind that isolates you—is the stuff nobody mentions. It's usually the tiny, mundane things that make you feel like you're constantly doing something wrong. You feel constantly trapped, kind of like a fish out of water.

Let me explain. In Uganda, if you're sitting next to someone—in an express taxi/bus, in a queue, anywhere—it's likely that you will strike up a conversation with them, or at least greet them. It's automatic. It's how you acknowledge another human being. When I first got on the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal and greeted the person next to me, they gave me a befuddled look, like they were expecting me to ask them for a favour after saying my gentle 'Hallo.' An uncomfortable smile and awkward silence followed. Small talk, which I'd always found natural and easy, became something to avoid. Back home, you can chat with a stranger and part ways with genuine warmth. Here, small talk with a stranger felt intrusive, like I was violating some invisible boundary.

I learned quickly: Don't do that too often here.

There's a hidden curriculum to living in a new culture—a set of unwritten rules that everyone around you already knows but nobody teaches you. They just expect you to figure it out. And when you don't, you feel the judgment, or worse, the indifference.

On top of that, there's the landscape itself. Wuppertal appeared rather hilly. No, Wuppertal, WAS and IS hilly — relentlessly hilly. It's nothing like the flat, open cities I'd imagined. I mean Kampala has seven hills too. But the valley in Wuppertal is tight, enclosed, and at times it feels claustrophobic. And when you're living in that valley—where the Schwebebahn runs and most of everyday life happens—it feels like the whole city is just one narrow, mostly grey corridor. When the sun comes out during summer, it's the relief that every one seems to have been yearning for all year. I'd come from the suburbs of Kampala, a sprawling city where you can see distance, where there's space to breathe. Here, I felt hemmed in.

I spent a lot of time in other German cities—Cologne, Düsseldorf, the bigger metropoles where I thought I belonged. And everywhere I went, when people found out I was living in Wuppertal, they'd say the same things:

"How can you live there?"

"Elberfeld is okay-ish, but the rest of it... Barmen, Oberbarmen—those areas are terrible."

"You should really try to move to a bigger city."

People weren't being cruel. They were just speaking from their own limited perspective. If you only see Wuppertal from the train station—if you only take a glimpse of the city from its valley corridor, with its industrial remnants and grey concrete—then yes, it looks uninspiring. If you listen to what people tell you to avoid, you never look anywhere else.

So I didn't look. I accepted their verdict: Wuppertal was not a city worth discovering. It was a city you passed through on your way to somewhere better.

I can't point to a single moment when this changed. There was no epiphany, no day when I woke up and suddenly loved Wuppertal. Instead, it was gradual. It was slow. It started when I began opening myself up to the city—I had to. I was here. I wasn't leaving immediately. I had to also think about the repercussions that moving would have had on my job prospects and, therefore, on my legal status as a non-EU national (or a 'third-state foreigner', as the law puts it). I might as well know where I was living.

And then I met people. Many of them were not from Wuppertal and had not lived here their whole lives, nor had they already decided what was worth seeing. I met outsiders. People like me, in a way, though their outsider-ness looked different from mine.

I met Germans whose parents were from Poland, from Korea, from Turkey, from Ghana, Congo-DRC and Côte d'Ivoire. I met people born and raised in Germany who didn't feel like they belonged in Wuppertal either, because they were from somewhere else in Germany—Düsseldorf, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne. I met people with African heritage, people whose families had come from places like mine, who'd grown up here but still carried that sense of displacement, that feeling of seeing things from an angle that nobody else seemed to share.

We were all outsiders, but we were outsiders together.

And something shifted when I started listening to their experiences instead of accepting the verdict of people who'd already made up their minds. They'd discovered things. They'd found neighborhoods I'd never heard of. They showed me that Wuppertal wasn't one thing. It wasn't just the grey valley that greeted you at the train station.

One of my many lessons learned is that people aren't lying when they say Wuppertal is ugly. They're just looking at it from one vantage point. If you only see the valley from its many train stations, you miss the high slopes where several neighbourhoods thrive. If you listen to stereotypes, you never look up. If you accept what people tell you to avoid, you never discover what's actually there.

My working-class background, the thing that had made coming to Germany so complicated in the first place, turned out to be an advantage. I had nothing to lose by exploring. I had no assumptions to protect. I was used to making something from less, finding beauty in overlooked places, understanding that worth isn't always visible at first glance.

And my Ugandan heritage and upbringing gave me a different perspectives on things entirely. I come from a country with a deep colonial history, with old buildings and ancient streets that carry stories. I'm someone who naturally reflects on who built this, when, and why. I think about layers, the history buried beneath the present moment.

That habit of looking deeper, of asking questions, of refusing to accept surface-level judgments; that's what allowed me to actually see Wuppertal.

For twenty years, I've been discovering Wuppertal, not as a tourist or sojourner would, but rather as someone who has built a life here. Someone who's invested in seeing this city clearly beyond the lens of my initial expectations, and beyond the lens of what people told me to think.

I came to Germany for Berlin. I got Wuppertal instead. And it took me years to accept Wuppertal, knowing very well, I didn't have to. It took years of small discoveries, conversations with outsiders like me, willingness to climb the hills and look beyond the valley—to understand that this turned out to be the best mistake.

The city I was so eager to leave gradually became home. It was not because I settled. But because I decided to look a little closer.

by Mariam Muwanga (Wuppertal)

And now I want to take you with me on my journey of discovery. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to walk you through fifteen places in this city. Fifteen moments that changed how I see Wuppertal. Some are neighbourhoods most people drive past without seeing. Some are parks that feel like they're hiding. Some are cultural landmarks that deserve more attention than they get. Some are just streets—ordinary streets where something extraordinary caught my eye.

This isn't a travel guide that is meant to convince you that Wuppertal is objectively beautiful or that my city is better than yours. It's an invitation to do what I finally learned to do: look beyond what you've been told to see.

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