conuly

And the trip back was a lot better than the trip out for Reasons. (Those reasons being, listen, dude, just because you occasionally see homeless people that does not actually make you an expert on the subject, and if your opinion is "ship them upstate" then I think all rational people can agree that you're not an expert. Upstate doesn't want them! And once they got there, what would they do? There's no jobs there, and they'd be away from their friends and family and everything that could help them become stable!)

Anyway, an ad on the car radio suddenly blared about "twenty cities in Europe you've always wanted to visit" and, I gotta tell you, no matter how much we stretched the point my mother and I could not come up with a full 20 cities in Europe we want to visit. We got 17, and one of them was Helsinki. No offense, but I don't actually want to visit Helsinki in this lifetime.

Our list, in no particular order, went something like:

1. Rome
2. London
3. Paris
4. Moscow maybe, is that Europe? (Edit: Though looking at google, it looks like the famous cathedral is in Saint Petersburg, so let's go there instead.)
5. Madrid
6. Barcelona
7. Capri? Is that a city? I'm gonna want to go to the beach, anyway.
8. Venice
9. Um, Vienna?
10. Berlin? Gotta say I'm not really feeling Berlin...
11. Helsinki? In the... summer? Midnight sun and all? I'm in the right time zone for that here, right? Anyway, one of those Scandinavian cities. In the summer.
12. Amsterdam! That's a popular city!
13. I think Lisbon has some nice museums maybe?
14. ...Brussels? I've been to Brussels, it's not that special.
15. Athens! How did we forget Athens?
16. Is Turkey Europe? If so, maybe Istanbul? They've got cats, I hear. (Insert five minute digression on cats in Istanbul, plus ten minutes obligatory singing.)
17. Nice would be nice, also, beaches.

We rejected several cities on the grounds that "nobody seriously wants to go there, you're just naming cities now", "If I go to $Country, I'm going to want to see their natural wonders, not their cities" and "this is a whirlwind tour of Europe, not a tour of Italy, anyway, there's got to be more to do on vacation than look at art and eat".

What say you? Twenty cities you've always wanted to visit? They don't have to be in Europe... or, if in Europe, in more than one country thereof.

****

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