Thursday, 16 January 2020

S is for...

So here's where it gets difficult. There are a lot of very cool cities beginning with S. 

Singapore, Seville, Santiago, Sydney, all cities that I would head - and indeed have headed - back to. And I really liked Skopje. And Shanghai. And St Petersburg. Plus I've never been to San Diego and a lot of people rave about that. What about Seoul? And Samarkand has been on my to do list for years...

But it's going to come down to two: 

San Francisco was one of my first city explores so would probably get a mention for fondness' sake even if it was, erm, Surabaya. It's not. It's ace. It has towers. It has neighbourhoods. It has Alcatraz. It has that bridge. It has sealions. I sort of wanted to dislike it (it was first US city at a time when I was rebelling against things rather than the cog in the capitalist wheel that I am nowadays) but it was great. 

Stockholm blew my mind. It's one city. On seventeen islands. How does that work? Who thought that would be a good idea? It makes it seem super airy - the airiest city I've been too. Maybe the one where water was the most dominant too. A proper wallet-busting capital city but completely in tune with nature. 

It's a tough call. But. S is for S... 

Hang on one cotton pickin' minute. Neither of those cities explode your world view in the way Sarajevo does. A city in a city in a bomb-ravaged carcass of a city. It's a place like nowhere else. That tunnel, those roses; and still it has heart. 

S is for Sarajevo and it's not even close. 

No comments:

Post a Comment