While looking through comments that got sent to my overly-aggressive link-spam filter, I found one that I thought was quite funny:

You've been to so many places… Big cities and great monuments…But then in Finland you visited Kisko, my home village. may I ask a simple question, why?

The short answer is of course that I was invited to Kisko by someone who has a house there. But, apart from that, I am a fan of small places. One of my most pleasant memories of France was the country side in Champaign. Boppard has topped my list in Germany. In US, I have fond memories of Hoquiam, WA. In Belgium, while Ghent is hardly a little village, it is a lot less known than the nearby Brugge and I thus liked it more.

I am not a huge fan of wilderness, but I like seeing places that seem stuck in time. In Beijing, I found the hutong most interesting. (I am of course fully aware of the difficulties of life without running water and am not glorifying the hutong.) Amuzingly, when talking to someone in Vladivostok about Beijing I head them say: “I didn’t like Beijing. It’s all fake. There is a beautiful façade of modern buildings, but once you step behind you see the ugly dirty alleys.” The “beautiful façade of modern buildings” is what I found precisely least exciting about Beijing. (Shanghai’s over-the-top modern architecture makes it interesting as a kind of “city of the future”. Beijing’s modern architecture makes it look like a generic 20th city century.)