The first time I ever visited Oslo (which I believe is the nearest I’ve been to the North Pole while on the ground) it happened to be June 20 — the longest day of the year. I had a magical and slightly surreal experience wandering around the town in the excellent company of the friends I was visiting, in a city without night. As midnight came and went, and darkness never quite arrived, I felt not tired at all, but rather exhilarated.<\/p>\n
The first time I ever visited Albuquerque it happened to be the weekend of the annual hot air balloon festival — one of the zaniest and most fun sights to be seen in these United States, with giant balloons in all sorts of surreal and eccentric shapes floating over the landscape. I didn’t realize at first that this was a once-a-year spectacular, so my initial thought was that I was witnessing a very civilized, if unusual, way for a town to be organizing its daily transportation needs.<\/p>\n
The oddest such experience was the first time I visited Nice, after having attended a conference in nearby Monte Carlo. I was delighted to discover that the streets of Nice were filled with jugglers, magicians, stilt-walkers and clowns, street fairs and puppet shows. Wherever I went, people wearing giant papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 heads were walking around in broad daylight, to the general delight of children. I found myself wondering at how tourist friendly Nice was, while pondering how on earth such a city could maintain a sustainable economic model. “Wouldn’t this be a great place to live all year round!” I thought.<\/p>\n
It took a while before I realized that I had just happened to wander into town during Carnival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first time I ever visited Oslo (which I believe is the nearest I’ve been to the North Pole while on the ground) it happened to be June 20 — the longest day of the year. I had a magical and slightly surreal experience wandering around the town in the excellent company of the friends … Continue reading “Picking the right day to visit”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8187"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8187"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8188,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8187\/revisions\/8188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}