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The Greenville, North Carolina MSA is the cultural, medical, retail, recreational and educational hub of Eastern NC. With a moderate year-round climate and the 3rd largest university in NC, there are numerous opportunities to engage in a diverse array of activities, whatever your age or interest. Come see what Pitt County and the Greenville NC, MSA are all about!
Sent by Kelly from Greenville, NC
Beyond the contemporary mystifying writings in mass media on this town aiming to attract visitors, Berlin is at first a real place: a conglomerate of economic struggles, education issues, post-industrial phenomena, country’s political capital, geographic axis of Eastern Europe and the “West”. It is too, a real place of local and international bohemians including well-established and emerging artists, pre and post-university relaxation seekers, European academic exchange program students, fashionistas and at the same time a beloved place for designers, IT-specialists, architects, musicians and researchers.
Specific areas of the town have been transformed in short periods from just residential into residential plus artistic/bohemian and creative professional. The district “Prenzlauer Berg” is the prototype. Being an affordable place for students and emerging artists in the early 90th, in which they moved in considerable quantity from west Germany and later from all over Europe and Americas, in order to live there. Prenzlauer Berg began to change its demographic face and spatial color and more deeply its social structures at late 90th by the subtle migration of new creative professionals and prolonging stay of those former students of city’s universities and art, acting and technical schools. The mix mad it: middle age entrepreneurs in conventional branches, start-up youngsters, real estate old sharks, emerging artists, physicians, handcraft people, lawyers, theatre, TV and cinema actors and finally “just living” bohemians. That’s Prenzlauer Berg today.
As Richard Florida mentioned once, there is no contradiction having family friendly, biologically regenerative atmosphere and a creative, gay and bohemian culturally regenerative surrounding in the same place. This area is showing clearly the benign and fruitful culmination of birth per capita index and bohemian index. The natural proximity of talent and productive forces within a tolerant and open “Kiez” (German word for a specific area) makes it worth to be here.
Sent by Harun from Berlin
I live in a fantastic city, named Changsha, but we would like to call her STAR CITY.Actually, this city is famous for her TV programs and movies in China,such as Happy Girl/Happy Boy in every summer holiday, a competition for hunting singers.
People here live in a happy and relax life everyday.We could go to bars to have a cup of beer at night till 4 am,or climb the mountain named Yuelu to breath the energy air,sometimes we choose to go through the river named Xiangjiang on boat,to see the view with our friends, and play on the island of the river, named Orange Island. It looks like STAR CITY is the only city in China, who has her own island among the city.
The creative industry in STAR CITY is also well known to tourists.If you are interested in some ancient buildings and streets, you could walk on Peace Street in a raining day.Because you can feel the romantic atmosphere there and recall your memory.If you are a fashion designer, you may find there are a lot of beautiful hand-make things there,such as pillows, skirts, and something else.If you were born to a gourmet, you should go to Fire Palace, it’s a traditional restaurant for u. And if you are a photographer，maybe you could try to take photo from the air by plane, and you can buy your own cute plane in STAR CITY, we are good at making small planes.
The weather in STAR CITY is significant, the four seasons in a year you can see and feel.We h ave snow at winter, and raining at summer, or leaves at fall, or flowers at spring.The girls in STAR CITY are beautiful for their good skin coming from the weather.And the man in STAR CITY are famous for their courage, the father of China studied here.The young people in STAR CITY are the leader of Chinese creative industry.They are good at cartoon design, music compose, TV and movie produce,they travel around the world to find partner to develop a modern culture in STAR CITY.
If you have a plan to come to China, remember make STAR CITY on your schedule.
Sent by Linna Fu from Changsha
Cochabamba, at the heart of Bolivia, is a city founded in 1571 by the Spaniards, where a small Indian town -Kanata- hosted temporary migrants farming the surrounding lands. It is in a valley mountains all around reaching almost 5,000 meters above the sea level. Less than one million people live in Cochabamba, and almost half of them are migrants from other Bolivian areas. Its mild temperatures all year long make the city a cozy place to live. Plenty of sun in winter, scattered showers in summer, let people enjoy walking and biking in its busy streets and in the countryside, where small farmers cultivate a variety of legumes, potatoes, corn, fruits and raise cattle, chicken and guinea pigs. Thanks to such a variety, the food in Cochabamba is one of the real pleasures for its inhabitants and visitors. No matter where you go to eat, you can be sure that you will get flavor and abundance for you money.
Cochabamba is far to be free from problems. The biggest one: water. Less than half of the households have running water from the public company. All the rest have their own private or collective wells, or get water from trucks. This is the main source of urban injustice> the poor have bad access to bad water and pays for that the most, while the middle and upper classes have better acces to a beter water at a cheaper price. That may justify the so called “water war” of the year 2000, only that such a movement was lead and captured by demagogues more inte rested in building their own power and worsened the water situation. Still… Cochabamba attracts thousands of migrants every year because its location provides job opportunities for all sorts of traders and vendors, service providers and transportation companies. Particularly in La Cancha, the biggest market place in Latin America, where a customer can buy, any time, from one of the 200 varieties of potatoes cultivated in the area, to the latest electronic gadget imported from Taiwan, from silk ties Hong Kong made, to the Jabulani used in the World Cup. Cochabamba… a place where you are welcome with a beer and a salteña!
Sent by Roblaser from Cochabamba
The Academy of Payne is a non-profit art studio in Daytona Beach, FL. Our program is targeted to help young adults who have aged from foster care, lower income families, or Juvenile Justice Centers.
At the Academy we enhance their already existing artistic abilities and teach them the financial literacy to start their own successful business and become a prodominent member of the community.We are a 501(c)3 non-profit organization and are producing a reality show August of 2010 to document the rebirth of Daytona’s economy with our art program. For more information, please go to: www.castingforacademy.com and www.academyofpayne.org.
Sent by Constance from Daytona Beach
No one has written about Indianapolis, the center of the Hoosier Heartland? Perhaps they are too busy bustling about the center of downtown, the ‘Circle’ or making their way to one of the NBA, NFL, or minor league baseball (done like a real big-leaguer!) venues. The city has become mine, albeit more of an adopted brother of my real suburban hometown just to the north of Carmel. I was born in Indy and the capital city has always been so accessible. Without a major transit system, I was still able to trek down historic Meridian Street in under 30 minutes to join in on any and all the festivities. It got even better when I gleefully turned 21.
So, while not truthfully residing within the bounds of Marion County, I experience the altruism of a city that has been a center of promise (the city is more-commonly-now called the ‘Little Chicago’ or ‘Chicago, Jr.’).
Once a mecca of amateur sports, the NCAA wised up and made it’s full-time home here in Indy where, thanks to a recent pact between the two, I am now guaranteed to see a major NCAA sports championship hosted every year until 2030-ish.
It’s a city that should have bigger cities on notice, is a center of activity, and swells hospitality of Hoosiers proud of their middle-American swagger.
Especially when it comes to basketball…
Sent by Nick from Indianapolis
…. things can happen out of nothing, and just over night. See for yourself http://CoOrpheum.de (there is also a Facebook group of same name).
Sent by Ralf from Dresden
“Champaign-Urbana. smart. innovative. micro-urban.” This video, produced by Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at U Illinois, was inspired by Director Mike Ross’s notion of Champaign-Urbana as a micro-urban community: one energized by creative and intellectual synergies that cross between community and campus. A thriving CU Pecha Kucha is one example of our grassroots cultural vitality.
Sent by Kelly from Champaign-Urbana, IL
My home is Dublin’s fair city, located on the beautiful emerald isle of Ireland. I love Dublin!
Dublin is a compact city and I’m lucky enough to live in a quaint cottage among a small tight knit and friendly community just outside the city centre. My walk to work takes forty carefree minutes and I’m sharing it with you in the hope that I can convey a little about the city I call home.
A few minutes after leaving home I encounter the Royal Canal immortalised by one of Ireland’s many famous writers Brendan Behan in ‘The Auld Triangle’ (which I occasionally attempt to sing after consuming too many pints of Guinness…).
A hungry feeling
Came o’er me stealing
And the mice were squealing
In my prison cell
And that auld triangle went jingle-jangle
All along the banks of the Royal Canal
Oh! To start the morning
The warden bawling
“Get up out of bed, you! And clean out your cell!”
And that auld triangle went jingle-jangle
All along the banks of the Royal Canal
Mountjoy Prison, to which Behan refers and in which he was incarcerated, still stands today and is a short distance further along the canal, though I do not pass it going to work (which is my personal prison!). I continue along North Strand Road where, on the night of 31 May 1941, four bombs were dropped by German aircraft. The casualties were many: 34 dead and 90 injured, with three hundred houses damaged or destroyed. This bombing was interpreted either as a deliberate ploy by Hitler s government to force neutral Ireland into the war or as a reprisal for the assistance given by Dublin Fire Brigade during the Belfast Blitz. After the war, Germany paid compensation to the Irish Republic for what it described as a military error.
Today, on either side of this same broad majestic road are gracious old trees that stand proudly, their lush green foliage injecting colour into the ubiquitous grey of city life. One of these trees had an unfortunate encounter recently with a double decker bus and needed to be significantly pruned – although I believe the bus came off worse!
I amble for another five minutes until I come upon the Five Lamps. Unlike some cities which are based on grid systems allowing their inhabitants to give directions according the intersections of avenues and streets, Dublin residents use local landmarks for identification (well-known pubs, an old cinema, a famous house etc.) . The Five Lamps is one such landmark and is exactly what is says – a dec orative lamp post, dating from the 1880s, with five lanterns standing at the junction of five streets – Portland Row, North Strand Road, Seville Place, Amiens Street and Killarney Street.
My route then takes me along Seville Place. At the end of this road I meet a beautiful new bridge opened towards the end of 2009. Named after another of our beloved writers, the Samuel Beckett Bridge was designed by the world-famous Spanish architect and engineer Dr Santiago Calatrava. It is beautiful and I enjoy walking over this fabulous structure every day passing over the River Liffey (which as kids we referred to the ‘sniffy Liffey’ due to the overwhelming stink of pollution, much improved now I’m happy to say).
I continue along by the river Liffey marvelling at how our city was transformed during the years of the Celtic Tiger. Conference centres, apartment buildings, restaurants and theatres now populate what until only a few years ago was a wasteland.
A short trip over a cobble-stoned street brings me to Dublin’s second canal, the Grand Canal. I walk along by its grassy tree-lined verge until I reach my office where poet Patrick Kavanagh sits in quiet reflection all day long every day on a bench by the canal (in the form of a statue of course!). I enjoy looking at him through the window from my desk, even though as a young student I was tortured by his unbearably grim poems…
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.
Lunchtime brings the office workers out for strolls in the vicinity including Raglan Road where Kavanagh redeemed himself for me with his composition of one of Ireland’s most beautiful verses, later sung with haunting beauty by Luke Kelly a ballad singer from Sheriff Street not far from the Five Lamps and only a quarter of a mile from Dublin’s main thoroughfare O’Connell Street.
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
And best of all, at the end of the working day Dublin’s magnificent bay is accessible at just a handy twenty minute commute.
Sent by Maria from Dublin
Lisbon, in Portugal, is the most western capital of Europe. Lisbon opens the way to the Tagus river and extends its ancient core through seven hills which testify several centuries of history. The Roman Empire, in the 1st century AD, has baptize the city with the name Olisipo. Over this legacy, the medieval city expanded after 1147, when D. Afonso Henriques, the first King of Portugal, conquered the territory to the Moors.
Despite the construction of a Christian new town, there are many influences, still visible today, of the Arabian presence, specially in Alfama neighborhood where we can walk in the twisting and narrow streets and alleys, similar to the characteristic North African cities. The successive generations incremented and overlapped to the dynamic of the city their existence and their architecture, creating a patchwork of lives and styles that complement or clash their selves…
The downtown was strongly modified by a disaster – the earthquake of 1755. In seconds, the reality of the neuralgic center of the city has been substituted – through the strong personality of the Marquês de Pombal, the first minister – by the one of the most important urban plans of Europe of the 18th century and a symbol of modernity and rationality. In the north of the city, emerged the urban tissue of the 19th century through the construction of the Avenida da Liberdade, a large avenue inspired in the Parisians boulevards. From Belém, in the west limit of the city, departed the Tagus river, in the 15th and 16th centuries, the flagships discovering the unknown world – Brazil, India, Angola, Mozambique, Ceylon, Japan…
Who is my City today? Like in other cities, there is a good side and a bad side. Lisbon ia a metropolis, aggregating a process of conurbation but, at the same time, is a cozy and a humanized city. In the historical area there is a mix of sun, light and poetry. The old buildings surround the “mother-hills” conferring organic forms. It appears that buildings have born of the hills. However, time and uncontrolled edification (sometimes chaotic) of the new urban and suburban areas, are the main factors of the abandon, the degradation and the aging of the ancient tissue. Urban rehabilitation is a recent political option and is beginning its first steps. But Lisbon is still beautiful. Joining the undulating skyline, the sun light gives to the city a powerful game of shadows and a nostalgic color. It re minds me a poem for music of Saudade, an untranslatable Portuguese word that means to miss someone or something. That music exists and is called Fado: played in every picturesque corner, it symbolizes the nostalgic feelings. Lisbon and Fado merge in a unique identity.
Sent by Sofia from Lisbon