[Zhenyuan]City*mosaic

1. Morning mist - Zhenyuan Town, Guizhou Province, China, 2. Morning mist - Zhenyuan Town, Guizhou Province, China, 3. Through Carved Lattice Shutters, 4. Morning mist - Zhenyuan Town, Guizhou Province, China

Empire of Signs

This city (Kyoto) can only be known only by an activity of an ethnographic kind: you must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing.
ROLAND BARTHES , Empire of Signs

Japan Voyage

I wonder what other joys await me in Kyoto, the widow royal city, where I will arrive tonight. Traveling is captivating hunting; you go out never guessing what bird will come along. Traveling is like wine: you drink and you can't imagine what visions will come to your mind. Surely while traveling you find all that you have within you. Without wanting to, from the innumerable impressions that overflow your eyes, you choose and select whatever corresponds more to the needs or curiosities of your soul. "Objective" truth exists only-and how insignificant it is!- in the photographic cameras and in the souls that see the world coldly, without emotion, that is, without deep contact. Those who suffer and love communicate through a mystical intercourse with the landscape they see, the people they mingle with, and the incidents they select. Therefore, every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.
NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS, Japan, China: A Journey of Two Voyages to the Far East

Cities comparison

TOP CITIES - Quality of life.

1 Zurich

2 Vienna

2 Geneva

4 Vancouver

5 Auckland

6 Dusseldorf

7 Munich

7 Frankfurt

9 Bern

10 Sydney

Mercer's 2008 Worldwide Quality of Living Index

Italian Hours

'It is a fact that almost everyone interesting, appealing, melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after many days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, settling in it and treating it, cherishing it, as a sort of repository of consolations; all of which today, for the conscious mind, is mixed with its air and constitutes its unwritten history. The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give.' Henry James, Italian Hours, 1909