In Chicago you feel the pressure of infinite surrounding plains; it's a city that fills the land; even the lake, enclosing one side, allow no escape. From time to time, at the end of a long ride by tramway, train, or elevated railroad, the buildings thin out, and it seems that the city is finally going to expire. Then it springs up again, even more vigorously; you've merely reached an old border, with new neighbourhoods built beyond. And beyond that there's is yet another belt, and another farther on. But it's not only these exorbitant dimensions that give Chicago its density. Los Angeles is vast but porous. This town is made of a thick dough, without leavening. More than any city in the world, it reeks of humanity, and this is what makes its atmosphere so stilfing and tragic. Neither nature nor the past can penetrate it, but in the absence of the picturesque, it possesses a dark poetry.
-Simone De Beauvoir, America Day by Day
Look Closer
"People rush through Athens on their way to the islands," he said, "and take in nothing but the Acropolis." Antonis recited the words of a shepherd he'd encountered while lost in the mountains: "A foreigner and a blind man are the same. They don't see what in front of them." And it's true - Athens has gotten a bad rap among travellers, for its traffic jams, overcrowded tourist sites, and seasonal air pollution. But there is another side to Athens, and those who focus only on the city's glorious past, Antonis says, are missing its seductive present: its sensual dry heat and sea light; its blue sky and bright flowers; the icy drinks, garlicky dips, and tangy cheeses served in cafes; the splashes of green and, everywhere, a citrusy smell; the startling hills that jut up heroically in the centre of town.
-Alan Brown, "Athens, Look Closer"
-Alan Brown, "Athens, Look Closer"
Palermo, Italy
I suppose Palermo, the great bay of Palermo with its lofty promontories thrust out into the sea, so noble in outline and in mass, Monte Pellegrino on the west, and Monte Alfano on the east, the city set as it were in a natural amphitheatre between them on the shore of the blue jewel-like sea, its palaces and turrets and minarets seen against the dark background of far flung mountains, and surrounded by the riches of all wales, the Conca d'Oro, running up in an ever narrowing valley into the great bare hills, with its olive gardens, its orange and lemon groves, its fig trees and almonds, its palms and agraves and its infinite flowers: I suppose Palermo is one of the loveliest places in the world.
-Edward Hutton, Cities of Sicily (1926)
-Edward Hutton, Cities of Sicily (1926)
Trees in Sydney
Sydney is so beautiful. The sparkling blue of the ageless harbour is framed by the verdant foliage of aged angophoras, she-oaks and Moreton Bay figs. On the other hand, they're blocking the view of the harbour and the houses overlooking it. This leads to outbreaks of midnight pruning. "Nature is amazing. It took this Moreton a century to grow. Pass the chainsaw. It'll take it a century to grow back. Imagine the price of this place then!" Jean Kittson is an Australian performer, writer and comedian in theatre and print, on radio and television. Quoted from Sydney Magazine (The Sydney Morning Herald)
Two quotes of Kathmandu
KATHMANDU
THERE ARE MANY THINGS ONE "SHOULD SEE" in this valley, but I secrecy resent being bossed by guidebook and am therefore a slipshod tourist. To me the little statue that one unexpectedly discovers down an alley way and impulsively responds to, means much more than the temple one had been instructed to admire for erudite and probably incomprehensible reasons.
-Dervla Murphy, The Waiting Land
KATHMANDU
THE ENERGY OF THE PLACE SLAMS LIKE A SHOCK wave... Kathmandu is so overwhelming, so packed with images, that succinct summaries seem almost impossible- certainly inadequate. I'm tempted to say "You'll understand when you get there...." It's a dream. I've never seen anything 1ike it.
-David Yeadon, The Back of Beyond
THERE ARE MANY THINGS ONE "SHOULD SEE" in this valley, but I secrecy resent being bossed by guidebook and am therefore a slipshod tourist. To me the little statue that one unexpectedly discovers down an alley way and impulsively responds to, means much more than the temple one had been instructed to admire for erudite and probably incomprehensible reasons.
-Dervla Murphy, The Waiting Land
KATHMANDU
THE ENERGY OF THE PLACE SLAMS LIKE A SHOCK wave... Kathmandu is so overwhelming, so packed with images, that succinct summaries seem almost impossible- certainly inadequate. I'm tempted to say "You'll understand when you get there...." It's a dream. I've never seen anything 1ike it.
-David Yeadon, The Back of Beyond
Osaka's Shinsekai
" Welcome to Osaka. Few major cities of the developed world could match Osaka for the overall unattractiveness of its city- scape, which consists mostly of a jumble of cube-like buildings and a web of expressways and cement-walled canals. There are few skyscrapers, even fewer museums and, other than Osaka Castle, almost no historical sites. Yet Osaka is my favorite city in Japan. Osaka is where the fun is: it has the best entertainment districts in Japan, the most lively youth neighborhood, the most charismatic geisha madams and the most colorful gangsters. It also has a monopoly on humor, to the extent that in order to succeed as a popular comedian it is almost obligatory to study in Osaka and speak the Osaka dialect. Osaka people are impatient and love to disobey rules; in that spirit, the best way to approach the city is to dispense with preliminaries and go straight to the heart of the mandala, which in Osaka's case is Tsutenkaku (the Tower Reaching to Heaven). Tsutenkaku is another of the towers which, like Tokyo Tower and Kyoto Tower, were built in every major city after World War II. Wartime bombing had almost completely obliterated Osaka's old downtown area, so the city redrew the streets in a huge burnt-out district, and built Tsutenkaku in the middle of it. The tower stands in the center of a rectangle covering about twenty square blocks called Shinsekai (New World), which is filled with restaurants, shops and theaters. Roads radiate from the arches under the tower like the avenues emanating from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. However, all resemblance to Paris, or even the amusement districts of other Japanese cities, ends here. Once the mecca of laborers, such as the farmers of Iya who flooded the cities in the decades after the war, Shinsekai has become a slum. In clean, organized and law-abiding modem Japan, this is an exceptional phenomenon. Most people visiting Shinsekai enter via Janjan Yokocho, an arcade stretching from Imamiya Station into the district's inte- rior. The minute you get out of the train station, you realize that you are in another country: drunks and homeless people stagger by, and young men are more likely to be wearing wide coolie pants and boots than the latest fashions from Tokyo's trendy Harajuku area. You pass a street market where you can buy second-hand underwear or a single shoe. Janjan Yokocho is dark and dingy - you see the occasional rat scurrying across from one building to another - but it is crowded with people. They are . coming to eat at the kushikatsu restaurants lining the street, which feature cheap meals of pork, chicken, onions and eggs, deep-fried on wooden skewers and washed down with plenty of beer and shochu (vodka made from rice). Interspersed among the kushikatsu restaurants are shogi halls, where people sit in pairs playing Japanese chess, watched through open latticed windows by knots of people gathered on the street outside.
ALEX KERR, Lost Japan
ALEX KERR, Lost Japan
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
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
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 SydneyMercer'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
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