by ben_w | 2026-01-31 12:04:15+00:00
Hmm.

I'd say that despite similarities for places built at the same time as each other, there's a huge range of variation in the places I've been.

First trip to the US was California, and the geography of the hills around Central Valley were substantially different in different places just within that region. Southwest, I saw hills that looked like Bryce's default textures which I'd previously assumed were mediocre approximations rather than based in reality; the Redwoods and Yosemite are very different from each other and the aforementioned, and the hills west of Winters and east of Sacremento are different again, and of course all are different to the Valley itself. On another trip I saw the Bonneville Salt Flats, I've yet to see anything else like them. All these are very different from the views around Zürich, or the UK South Downs (which unsurprisingly given the name is similar to New England and Brittany), and all those are different to the west coast of Wales; when I later saw the Spanish Mediterranean coast and the area around Athens, they reminded me of some of the wine areas around Paso Robles (which shouldn't be surprising given wine).

Within cities, Berlin has incredibly wide streets unlike anything I've found elsewhere; Athens is the exact opposite, with at least a few of roads in the tourist core (near the Parthenon) almost too narrow even for the smaller size of car common in Europe and pedestrian paths only a few cm wider than my elbows are apart, and so many ancient ruins you could practically trip and fall over them. The UK and Germany where I've lived, one can quickly learn to spot which era any given house was made in, with a handful of still-standing medieval buildings in the UK (mostly churches), then typical stylings visible for late 18th century (e.g. Bath), then a gap to the late 19th century to early 20th (in both countries but with more Gothic in the UK and more Neo-Classical and Art Nouveau in Berlin), then another gap where little survives to today, then post-war (British housing estates and DDR soviet style Plattenbau); these are very different to Swiss rural styles, to the narrow buildings you can find in Amsterdam. The UK and France also still retain a lot of medieval castles in various states of repair and museum-ification.

Bologna still has a lot of medieval structures around, including two leaning towers. Venice may be famous for the canals, but the famous ones are not the entire set, the ones I remember seeing went right up to the hotel I was in and functioned like roads, with a similar vibe to the roads of Athens (only without the footpaths at all because footpaths were a completely independent system), while the canals in Amsterdam were broad and felt more like the spaces dedicated to the Straßenbahn and U-Bahn in Berlin.

Budapest felt like a decaying museum to itself, or a ruin in which people nevertheless still lived and worked.

NYC deserves the name "urban jungle", it was like walking through canyons where the "mountains" (skyscrapers) were so distant and large as to defy not just the instant parallax between my eyes, but also the time-delayed parallax one normally gets from walking towards or away from a thing.

Cyprus (caveat: I've only been to Larnaca) was a mix of British road furniture, medieval castle, and a Church that pre-dates England (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Saint_Lazarus%2C_Lar...), with the half-finished look to many properties where the rebar was still poking out of the uppermost surface of enough buildings to notice and visible water tanks on most of them (https://www.google.com/maps/@34.9108686,33.6190677,3a,15y,41...)

Nairobi mixed a British 50s-60s Brutalist core (presumably because of who was in charge in the 50s-early 60s) with main streets that were variously poorly repaired and unpaved, and minor streets that varied from "this could be any middle class residential area in Europe" to "this has been accidentally cobbled by people treading plastic bottles into the soil as they pass"; there is another easily recognisable style here, best shown rather than described, this kind of wall lack-of-surface-finishing: https://www.google.com/maps/@-1.2844081,36.9005201,3a,30y,35...