Germany's Top Five

Shift down to first gear in Olafur Eliasson's Dufttunnel (scent tunnel) at Volkswagen's Autostadt in Wolfsburg. Walk through the Danish-Islandic artist's installation of over 2,000 pungent-smelling flower pots, inhaling the scents of the plants. The tunnel revolves around a bridge and is bedecked with the pots, which are filled and re-filled according to what plants are in season.

Try to get your head around the "Chief Engineer of the Universe" at a Berlin exhibition in Albert Einstein's honor. Organized under the aegis of the eminent Max Planck Institute, the show aims to make Einstein understandable for the layman and explain how he has shaped our world view. The exhibition is one of the highlights of Germany's Einstein Year, paying tribute to the scientist 100 years after he published his theory of relativity and 50 years since he died. The show is on view in Berlin's Kronprinzenpalais.

Take part in tradition at Hamburg's yearly live screening of the Eurovision Song Contest. On May 21 beginning at 8 p.m., thousands of locals will gather on the Reeperbahn boulevard to watch the annual Grand Prix of (mainly) cheesy and (often) badly sung European pop songs. This year the contest will be broadcast from Kiev, Ukraine. Germany's participant, Gracia, will be representing her country with the song "Run and Hide" that some say sounds like yodelling -- a Swiss, not German, tradition.

Spend a night laughing at the ins and outs of British politics at the self-proclaimed biggest English-language theater on the continent. In "Feelgood," at the English Theater Frankfurt, playwright Alastair Beaton takes a satirical jab at UK politics. The much acclaimed play is set on the eve of the prime minister's speech to his party's annual conference in a seaside resort as anti-capitalism protesters demonstrate outside.

And if you want to see things get ugly, just before potentially upsetting state elections in North Rhine Westphalia, make your way to the state capital's Aquazoo in Düsseldorf to watch the sharks feed. Visitors can witness eight sharks in action on Mondays and Wednesdays at 11:30 a.m. as they're fed their morning rations.