My Least Favorite Places

In all the words I spent writing about my favorite places (including too much time spent complaining about places I didn’t like), I thought it would be worthwhile to have a larger discussion of my least favorite places. There are more than a few.

Surprisingly I just returned from Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, a war-torn area that still struggles with ethnic and border disputes, and they don’t make the list. I’ve been to worse places, to be sure.

One of them is Kiev in 2005, a much worse city than Kiev was 15 years before. The new Kiev has the feel of a corrupt, lawless city of too many people who have nothing to do except scam the weak and unprotected. There are roughly three million people who live in the city and I think they were all at the airport in black leather jackets offering to take my bags to their car and to god knows where. There could be no trusting this wretched bunch. Orange Revolution notwithstanding, there is no short-term hope for the place. And if they want to continue to complain about how cold they are because Russia won’t sell them natural gas at one-third the market price, they can put on their orange scarves to keep warm.

There are some who say Paris is for lovers by I say Paris is for lovers of garbage. There are few filthier cities. When there was a garbage strike a few years ago it was difficult to notice the difference. Paris is a xenophobe’s paradise because huge numbers of immigrants and refuges have recently made it their home. This melting pot of millions has never melted and instead have all settled in their own homogenous neighborhoods. You drive through one section populated by northern Africans followed by a shanty area of central Africans until you run into a variety of disparate and unforgiving Middle Easterners. Occasionally you bump into a Parisian – or, better, their car bumps into you – but they never stick around long enough to exchange pleasantries as they’re trying to navigate the quickest way to the French enclave of the city. Seriously, look at a photo of the Mona Lisa, watch a Truffaut movie, and spend all your money on French perfume at the local mall and you’ll have no real reason to go to Paris.

Athens is another place to stay clear of. I know, it has all this great, ancient history covered in great and ancient dirt. Granted we were there in 2000 as the city was totally under construction awaiting a throng of soon-to-be unhappy tourists and athletes for the Olympics. Of course unhappy is the only way to describe the residents of Greece. Unless you’re on an over-crowded ferry heading for one of the nearby islands, there is not much in Athens to make you happy. The traffic is horrendous with irritated driver’s hands placed firmly on their horns as if this mélange of noise could possibly move the traffic one inch. As another qualifier (and to avoid an angry letter from Mari, Ari and Celeste) it should be noted that we were there shortly after our peace-loving President Clinton had just finished bombing the crap out of the Balkans, causing literally millions of Macedonians and other refuges to join the crowd in Athens and lend their hand to the important ongoing honking. This made Americans very unwanted, a point brought close to home during a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of a taxi trip to a Hard Rock Café. There was one pleasant moment at our hotel – and not the one the kids are thinking about – when we had a wonderful dinner on the roof of our hotel with our Parisian friend Jean (okay, there’s one reason to go to Paris, but even he eventually moved out of town). The weather was perfect and we had an unobstructed view of the light show at the Parthenon. The food wasn’t that bad, either. Of course this was the same hotel where a British diplomat had been gunned down a few months earlier, diminishing the perks of topless sunbathers at the pool (so I heard).

Sonsanate and San Salvador, with apologies to my partner Max, were no garden spots. Sonsanate makes the list if for no other reason than its hopeless poverty. I know there are more impoverished places and giving in to the fact that the people who lived there didn’t seem to realize they were impoverished, it still broke your heart to see. Perhaps more troubling was the knowledge that it wouldn’t take more than a week’s worth of automatic teller charges in the U.S. to make a year's difference in Sonsanate. I was more bothered by San Salvador because there was a lot of poverty and some huge wealth and the people there know the difference. Crime is rampant and it’s difficult to feel safe anywhere. The wealthy have razor wire over the walls that surround their home, much of it left over from the civil war that nearly wrecked the country a decade ago. The middle class, such as it is, pool their resources to pay for heavily armed security 24/7, which only serves to drive the bandits to the neighboring streets whose residents can’t afford the security.

I know there is a certain segment out there who loves Amsterdam. I just don’t like the city or that particular segment who loves it. Sure, there are cultural amenities to Amsterdam such as the Van Gogh and Rembrandt museums, and plenty of good, classical concerts. It’s just that they’re all overridden by the graffiti on the outside of the museums and the local permissiveness that attracts people who crave permissiveness. With low cost airlines targeting Amsterdam, it has become the Tijuana of Europe for badly-behaved bachelor parties, inebriated miscreants and serious drug users (although the Harold and Kumar types who still giggle that they can get some legal pot, man, can be charming). Because of the beer flowing out of all sides of the drinkers, the city was forced to install outdoor and very public urinals to better organize the public urination off the walls of businesses and restaurants and out in the open where, I suppose, they believe it belongs. Where else can the ladies get an outside glimpse of the inside of a men’s room but in Amsterdam? And then there are the rows of “cabins” where Eastern European, Russian and African women show what they have to sell. Okay, it’s fun to see it once, but after awhile it gets sort of boring. It’s not like you’d want to do anything other than walk down the alleys and avoid direct eye contact, unless spending 300 euro to get 10 minutes of detached sex with a stranger is attractive to you. Not that I know it costs 300 euro; it’s just a guess. I know there are lovely sides of Amsterdam – the canals, the history, the work ethic. I suppose the people who live there learn to put up with the section of the city that is a monument to tolerance and progressive thought. It’s just not for me.

There are a number of other cities that are pretty disgusting, but they have some overriding charm to make up for the deficiencies elsewhere. St. Petersburg, Russia is a frightful place for the most part, but there are areas that are unbelievably rich in culture and history. Bucharest, with its attempt to mix huge numbers of gypsies with gypsy-haters and which holds the world’s worst architecture by the world’s worst dictator/architect still has sections of the city untouched by crazy communist leaders where you can enjoy a coffee and snack at a number of outdoor cafes. Romanians like to call their capital the “Little Paris” and fortunately they modeled much of it on the old Paris just in time before people will start to call Paris the “Little Bucharest.” Tirana is a dusty dump (see below) and there is no excuse for the place. The Albanian capital has been made all the more distasteful by a new government (that we help get elected) trying to outdo the corruption of the last corrupt government; a difficult task indeed.

The U.S. has its ugly cities too. Drive around any city or town in Texas, save for Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, and there is no place you’d less rather be. Midland/Odessa is downright scary it’s so ugly, El Paso makes Juarez livable, and East Texas is something out of To Kill a Mockingbird. Large sections of Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC, St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago will make any reasonable person long for the natural beauty of Tirana. And don’t get me started on New Orleans. What a dump that place is, and that was before the hurricane.

Understanding I just insulted millions of people (although I suspect the people of Tirana would wholeheartedly agree with me); I also recognize there every place has something of redeemable value. It may be more difficult to find it, but I’m sure it’s there.