My effort at inventing a meme

[fivemack]

[Poll #518148]

The counter-intuitive list above is the fifteen biggest cities (counting urban areas as cities, hence the top one ...) of the EU. All more than 2.6 million people. LJ won't let me list more than fifteen tickyboxes; the next few are Lisbon, Budapest, Munich, Stuttgart, Warsaw, Vienna, and that gets down to two million.

Comments

[rwl.livejournal.com]

Not only have I visited Katowice, I've been there many times. Some very good friends are there.

I've only been to two other cities in the list -- Rome and Berlin. Of the next six, though, I've been to three of them (Warsaw, Vienna, and Budapest).

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

I feel ... untravelled.
On the other hand, I've driven past Birminham on the M6 a number of times, and stopped over in Frankfurt airport for a couple of hours - they count, right ?

(and, oddly enough, will be visiting Berlin for a weekend in August, and aim to visit a few more on that list by the time we decide to return Down Under)

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

Bah, "Birmingham".

[brrm.livejournal.com]

Also been to Munich and Vienna.

I've really no excuse for not having been to Berlin, though. Must fix this at some stage.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

You'll love it -- at least, I did -- and it's easy to get to; fifty pounds each way by Easyjet from Bristol.

My wanderlust appears to have increased since I noticed that I had -2 vacation days left in my current chunk.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I *would* have gone to Berlin, but at the time it was *West* Berlin, requiring a trip through the DDR to get to, and because of my boyfriend's security clearances, he couldn't get permission to go. Drat! I really wanted to see Dresden, too.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

Why haven't I heard of Katowice? It appears to be in Poland, but I feel moderately well travelled in Polan. I don't know how I can have missed it. Maybe because both times I went I had Polish speaking hosts to plan the travelling.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Katowice is down in Silesia, and I get the impression it's very much the heavy-industrial heartland of Poland. It's skipped over in a couple of pages by backpacking guides, and the online list of tourist attractions includes the railway station and the football stadium: I suspect brown-coal mines do not a tourist hotspot make.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

That probably explains it. I have been to a few non-tourist hotspots in Poland for various reasons (such as a friend's wedding) but most of the places I have been were at least vaguely on the tourist agenda or at least surrounded by nice countryside.

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

How far are you extending "the Cologne area"? From ranking it top, I assume it's all of Rheinland, pretty much a triangle 150km on a side from Bonn to Mönchengladbach and Dortmund? By the same metric, the North of England (Leeds down to Nottingham and across to Liverpool, taking in Manchester, Bradford and Sheffield) should count as one area (with a very nice lightly inhabited bit right in the middle).

[meirion.livejournal.com]

i'm surprised (but pleased) liverpool's on there and manchester isn't!

rome (and probably napoli) will be on the "have-visited" list in another month.

am realising quite HOW MUCH i miss paris and need to be there.

-m-