Quote:
Originally Posted by LosAngelesSportsFan
Tokyo felt larger and more intense than LA and NY combined. Just insane and never ending
|
If we used American Census definitions to calculate the "Tokyo-Yokohama-Kawasaki-Saitama-Chiba CMA", it actually
would be larger than LA and NY combined!
Here's something worth mentioning though, lest everyone think I'm one of those expats who likes to shit on home: NYC is still, in my opinion, the grandest city on the planet. Nothing -
nothing - is as impressive to me as the Midtown skyscraper canyons. The only city in Asia which has hints of NYC's grandeur is Shanghai.
I've thought a lot about what makes each of the world's famous mega-cities special. NYC has grandeur on lock. Paris is singularly beautiful. London is paradoxically intimate. Shanghai has an unrivaled level of energy. Tokyo is humanity's most significant accomplishment of scale. Sao Paulo might be humanity at its most intense. Taipei might be the largest collection of friendly positivity and optimism on the planet. I don't know what to make of Jakarta and Bangkok, even after visiting many times. Seoul is a hard one to peg a specific attribute to as well. Beijing changes too fast for me to form a lasting opinion. And Manila . . . makes me sad.