OUR FAMILY HOLIDAYS
9185 Places I Like and Don't
I am not a chauvinist, but I guess I like Britain best of all. That is probably because I am used to it. Thus, I love the scenery of North Wales, but that was where much of my childhood -- holidays at least -- was spent. It is nowhere near as grand as the Alps, certainly not the Himalayas, and is not as beautiful as the Simian Mountains in Ethiopia. But it means a lot to me.
In terms of scenery I suppose the other mountainous areas that I have just described are impressive. Equally, the Grand Canyon is monumental -- but I found myself slightly alienated by the sheer scale of it.
I think it is probably the human scale which is important to me, even in scenery. Thus I probably prefer Chicago to New York, precisely because the skyscrapers – which, thanks to Mies, are beautiful -- are much easier to see and to appreciate.
On the other hand you can get too much of a good thing. I remember touring the West Coast of the US and, on entering the desert at Palm Springs, everyone was at the windows of the coach snapping the deserts and cacti and before they disappeared. Three days later they were still there but people were no longer taking pictures. The same is true for much of the West Coast Pacific Highway which, for example, also stretched to three days.
In some respects the Nile is the same, with temple after temple succeeding each other. Each one would beautiful and interesting in equal measure, but after a while you didn't really care. You have seen so much of that your senses are saturated. That is probably another reason why I like Britain, because you get a small amount -- perhaps the right amount -- before you move on to the next experience. Much the same can be said of the chateau in the Loire Valley I love them, but they all run together in my memory.
On the other hand Paris is certainly a lovely city, justifiably one of the most beautiful in the world; though Parisians are just about the unfriendliest people in the world. For excitement I would add San Francisco, and possibly Chicago and New York.
But then my ideas about places have changed. In the case of New York, for example, it was literally not until my fifth visit to New York before I appreciated it. Before that, staying in New Jersey and just going in for the day, I more or less hated its oppressive character. At the fifth visit I stayed in the Rockefeller Centre -- actually in the Hilton on the Avenue of the Americas -- and roamed around as if it was my own town. It was clinched when I saw the Greek Day parade moving down Fifth Avenue. It was a very emotional experience, seeing all those immigrants and realising just how important they were to the American myth.
I also changed my views on Florence, which - after several visits - I came to love on the basis of its galleries, versus Venice which I eventually felt was rather like a Hollywood back-lot!
Equally, the first time I went to Palm Springs -- just passing through on what happened to be the day when all the American undergraduates descended on it -- I hated it. Later, at the IBM club when I spent almost a week there, it was marvelous. Waking up in the morning with the sun rising on the mountains behind the hotel, diving into what was effectively my own private pool and then spending the day riding through the deserts, it was life as it should be.
On the other hand, Tokyo is the pits. We traveled for almost 200 miles along the coast and all of this was still the suburbs of Tokyo. Much the same can be said of Los Angeles. It is, in other words, the pits; unless you are one of the producers living in the private luxury of Beverly Hills.
On the West Coast, however, perhaps by my favourite place is the Santa Clara valley, popularly known as Silicon Valley. It is just about on the edge of the desert which runs down through Los Angeles and consequently has all year round sunshine, but it is close enough to San Francisco -- less than an hour away -- for it to be in touch with civilization. I guess is a very rich area, and with its computer industries a very dynamic one. There my favourite place was in Los Gatos, in a bookstore where -- longer before it happened elsewhere -- they served coffee and played Mozart. It has probably long since disappeared into the dusts of time.
I guess I do like the South of France, especially Cannes with its Croisette, and would love to live there; if it wasn't for the French language and to a certain extent the French people who hate foreigners. On the other hand I would hate to live anywhere on the Spanish coast.
All in all, though, I still prefer Britain.
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