--This is why you should care about the 2nd Amendment, even if you don't care about (or for) guns (and for the record, I neither particularly care about or for guns, myself.) If "shall not be infringed" means anything other than exactly that, then "Congress shall make no law", etc., don't mean a whole hell of a lot, either.
--This seems to be under the radar in the national media, but marijuana possession in the City of Seattle is now effectively decriminalized. (Hooray Seattle!)
--The only basketball league that will suck worse than the WNBA.
Showing posts with label cities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cities. Show all posts
1.21.2010
9.30.2008
philadelphia: the paris of the mid-atlantic
Don't laugh, I'm being serious here. And don't think I'm trying to backhand Paris either; [m] and I honeymooned in Paris, and the experience left me an unabashed Francophile.
Anyway, we decided to take a weekend trip to Philadelphia to celebrate 3 successful years of being married to each other. Our reasons for choosing Philadelphia were:
1) It is close enough to fly (relatively) inexpensively and quickly
2) We like big cities where you can do lots of stuff without a car
3) Neither of us had spent any time there
We stayed in Center City, a few blocks from City Hall. We ate at the recently-opened Distrito, a Mexico City-style "tapas" place that is, in a word, unfuckingbelievablygood, at the excellent-but-perhaps-a-bit-overblown-due-to-celebrity Morimoto, and at a charming modern Mexican place called Lolita where, thanks to Pennsylvania's famously arcane liquor licensing, you can't order a beer but you can bring your own bottle of tequila and they will provide you with pitchers of fine concoctions with which to mix it. Also, we ate cheesesteaks for breakfast Saturday morning and found some very good dim sum on Sunday in Chinatown.
So how is Philadelphia like Paris?
1-As already alluded, there is excellent food to be had all over town, from street vendors all the way up through haute cuisine and everything in between.
2-Great beauty is interwoven with centuries of urban grit, pretty much everywhere. (OK, most of the scenery on the train ride out to the airport is just grit. But it's that way in Paris, too.) Art and artists everywhere you look.
3-Attitude; both Philadelphians and Parisians are (unfairly, I think) known for being unfriendly, even rude, especially to outsiders. I can honestly say that this was not my experience in either place, and in fact, I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the people we met in both places.
4-The Philadelphia Museum of Art is so ridiculously disorganized it is hard to believe that it isn't run by the French.
5-The airport and trains are very dated, but they get you where you need to go.
6-I find both cities chaotic in a way that I find genuinely endearing. This is difficult to explain, because it reflects my own (perhaps odd) sensibilities about such things, but I enjoy the general upheaval and random encounters you can experience in places like Paris and Philly (and Portland and Durham and [parts of] Tucson) that are the very things places like Thousand Oaks, Cary, and Peachtree City are specifically designed to prevent.
Bottom line: I think Philly is a great, and massively underrated town. If I had to pick a place to live in the Megalopolis, it'd be my first choice.
Anyway, we decided to take a weekend trip to Philadelphia to celebrate 3 successful years of being married to each other. Our reasons for choosing Philadelphia were:
1) It is close enough to fly (relatively) inexpensively and quickly
2) We like big cities where you can do lots of stuff without a car
3) Neither of us had spent any time there
We stayed in Center City, a few blocks from City Hall. We ate at the recently-opened Distrito, a Mexico City-style "tapas" place that is, in a word, unfuckingbelievablygood, at the excellent-but-perhaps-a-bit-overblown-due-to-celebrity Morimoto, and at a charming modern Mexican place called Lolita where, thanks to Pennsylvania's famously arcane liquor licensing, you can't order a beer but you can bring your own bottle of tequila and they will provide you with pitchers of fine concoctions with which to mix it. Also, we ate cheesesteaks for breakfast Saturday morning and found some very good dim sum on Sunday in Chinatown.
So how is Philadelphia like Paris?
1-As already alluded, there is excellent food to be had all over town, from street vendors all the way up through haute cuisine and everything in between.
2-Great beauty is interwoven with centuries of urban grit, pretty much everywhere. (OK, most of the scenery on the train ride out to the airport is just grit. But it's that way in Paris, too.) Art and artists everywhere you look.
3-Attitude; both Philadelphians and Parisians are (unfairly, I think) known for being unfriendly, even rude, especially to outsiders. I can honestly say that this was not my experience in either place, and in fact, I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the people we met in both places.
4-The Philadelphia Museum of Art is so ridiculously disorganized it is hard to believe that it isn't run by the French.
5-The airport and trains are very dated, but they get you where you need to go.
6-I find both cities chaotic in a way that I find genuinely endearing. This is difficult to explain, because it reflects my own (perhaps odd) sensibilities about such things, but I enjoy the general upheaval and random encounters you can experience in places like Paris and Philly (and Portland and Durham and [parts of] Tucson) that are the very things places like Thousand Oaks, Cary, and Peachtree City are specifically designed to prevent.
Bottom line: I think Philly is a great, and massively underrated town. If I had to pick a place to live in the Megalopolis, it'd be my first choice.
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