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| Subject: Splendid! | |
Author: Ed Harris (Venezia) | [ Next Thread |
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] Date Posted: 23:29:43 12/14/04 Tue In reply to: Jim (Canada) 's message, "Toronto is no longer clean - it's getting like Detroit with crime, filth and homelessness" on 22:24:05 12/14/04 Tue I make it one of my rules in life never to waste an air-fare going to a city which scores highly on the annual UN Top 100 Cities list. They are all places like Geneva, Copenhagen, the Hague, or, worse still, bloody Vaduz. They are scored according to a lot of categories in which no sane person could possibly be interested unless that person were Swiss: cleanliness, crime-rates, levels of air-poluion, noise-polution, absense of grafitti, efficacy of traffic lights, proliferation of pedestrian crossings, disabled access to bungee jumping events, straightness of white-lines up the middle of the road, and so forth. You get the idea. As a result, Basle and Stockholm are invariably decreed to be Greater Cities than London and New York. Such twaddle. The idea is to look for the cities about half-way down the list: say, way after Zurich and way before Baghdad. If Toronto has joined this list, then I will be the first at Canada House in Trafalgar Square clutching my passport and pointing out just how valuable a Canadian citizen I would be... [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Criteria... | |
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Author: Dave (UK) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 15:47:41 12/15/04 Wed Whereas I would agree that some of the cities you list are pretty, but essentially soulless places, I think you are being a bit unfair in dismissing the criteria with which they are judged. I would assume that the absence of graffiti and litter from a city would denote the absence of feckless yobs, or the presence of law enforcement: both of which I think are desirable characteristics. If London had no ghettos, no commie-blocks, no litter and perfectly painted white lines, would it not be perfect? [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Depends how you look at it. | |
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Author: Ed Harris (Venezia) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 16:33:26 12/15/04 Wed In my opinion, these negative things which you list are the inevitable symptoms of things which we would miss were they abolished: vitality, tolerance, and above all a relaxed attitude towards minor irritants. In Singapore, there is no chewing gum on the streets, but this has been achieved at the cost of the most stomach-churning authoritarian measures which we would not accept in London. Road accidents in Geneva are rare, but I have been at pedestrian crossings in Switzerland, and watched as the natives stand at a red light, waiting for it to go green, in spite of the fact that there are no cars coming in either direction. Indeed, on one occasion when I just charged across an empty side-street with a complete disregard for the fact that the little green man had not yet lit up, an elderly lady remonstrated with me, drawing my attention (in the Swiss' quaint imitation of German) to the little red man's continuing presence in our lives... and I was able to stand in the middle of the road and listen to her do this because of the total absence of traffic. I suspect that she went away with the conclusion that I was one of those notoriously eccentric and erratic Italian visitors, what with all this crossing-the-road-outside-the-prescribed-moment madness, the like of which she had only previously seen on a shopping trip to Milan to get furs. I stand by my contention that the world's cleanest and safest cities have had all the life sucked out of them. Perfection is, after all, just another trade name for blandness. As for removing feckless yobs from London, I think that we pretty much have; or, rather, we have moved them out of London Proper to the Dreaded Outskirts (a solution borrowed form Paris, I should think), where they can't bother anyone except for other feckless yobs ;-) [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: 'vitality' | |
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Author: Ian (who lives there) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 00:18:39 12/16/04 Thu You'd love Porto Alegre, Ed. It is seething with vitality: the smell of it can be overwhelming at times, you have to be careful not to step in it when you are walking around in town, it almost certainly will never stop for you at a pedestrian crossing, it avoids any unnecessary proximity to silly foppish concerns like the rule of law, and as soon as it can scrape together a few million in embezzled public funds, you can sure it will be hiding it away out of sight in those lovely tax havens of yours. Oh, and it's also terribly proud of being the Brazilian capital with the highest quality of life. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: So how much are flights from London? | |
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Author: Ed Harris (Venezia) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 01:07:20 12/16/04 Thu I've spent far too much time in the 3rd world to me much concerned with odours and corruption... In fact, if I couldn't live in London I'd probably choose Bombay. Such fun. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: I hear Bogotá is quite nice at this time of the year... | |
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Author: Dave (UK) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 09:44:27 12/16/04 Thu [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |