When you guys are talking about the “city” in Phuket I think you mean Patong, which is a sex-trade based horrorshow that would make Sodom and Gomorrah blush. However, Phuket Town itself, about 20km away from Patong, is quite pleasant, in a medium-sized unremarkable southern Thai town way.
I have a friend who saw the King Tut exhibit in Egypt back in the 1980s and said the same thing. He said (at the time) a lot of the stuff was laid out on those big folding tables you see at convention halls that were covered in fabric. He said if felt like going to a really weird rummage sale or a cut-rate wax museum in Niagara Falls. A lot of key pieces were a lot smaller than he expected and the building was really dirty. He was expecting “wonderous”.
I guess it was similar to the exhibit they just had in Toronto. The cool “gold sarcophagus” that was in all the bus and subway ads was actually only 20 inches tall or so. But from all the photos in the ads, were were expecting one that would have actually been big enough for the actual dude’s mummy.
Heh, amusingly, the actual royal mummy - of Ramses l - was for a century an exhibit in a cut-rate house-of-horror in Niagra Falls! (It was later discovered to be a real royal mummy and returned to Egypt).
I can imagine the Ka or poor old Ramses looking at the gawking tourists getting their two-bits-a-gander at his hideous dried-up corpse and thinking "this is not the afterlife I was expecting … :smack: " 
[As for the warriors of Xian - when I went, there was literally a whole army of 'em covered by a huge stadium-like roof. There is a picture of it on the Wiki site: Terracotta Army - Wikipedia They were not smashed by angry peasants, being buried underground.) ]
Wow. I have to totally disagree on Athens. The Acropolis is amazing, the Plaka is fun, and even Monastiraki’s flea market and the tourist-y stuff around Omonia Square was great Plus the museums, and the temple of Zeus and. . .yeah. I thought Athens was awesome. I liked it more than Rome, which I saw on the same trip. It felt more real, and more friendly.
Rome was awesome, but crowded. I enjoyed the Vatican quite a bit (we were within a five minute walk of St. Peter’s). And the day trip to Naples/Pompeii was truly fucking incredible.
About the only place that I’ve visited that I’ve found underwhelming is Toronto. I went when I was about 14, and it was just. . .well, underwhelming is a good word. It felt exactly like any large city, without any sort of individual flavor. The highlight of that trip was sneaking down to the pay phone near the pool to call my best friend in Illinois (lesson learned after that trip: collect calls aren’t free). And, lest you think I was just being a brat teenager, the same grandmother and cousin I went with to Toronto also went to Ottawa a bunch of times, and I loved every trip there. Sparks Street, the Parliament buildings, Byward Market, the Mint, the museums…yeah, I’d totally live there. Not in Toronto, though. Yawn.
What? I knew it wouldn’t take very long for someone to post something completely contrary to my experience, but this is just baffling. The only way this makes any sense to me at all would be if you stayed in and around Belize City and didn’t go anywhere else.
I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that I didn’t enjoy this museum as much as I could have if the placards were in English. It was weird; every big museum I have EVER gone to has had placards in English. If I’m at a small museum in a place with minimal tourism (ie, every museum I went to in Colombia), it’s not a surprise, but a big museum in Italy? It was just…odd.
They were both. The tomb was looted soon after he was buried and the terra cotta soldiers were smashed to bits- almost none remained whole- and what you see now was carefully pieced together.
I found it to be both underwhelming and overwhelming at the same time, somehow.
Don’t care for most of the island of Phuket either, but the town of Phuket has some interesting old Portuguese architecture. No beach to speak of, as it’s on the eastern or landward side of the island; the town/beach that’s generally recognized as a shithole is Patong. What jjimm says is spot on.
Chicago has some of the best museums in the world. If you enjoy going to museums, like I do, it’s a great destination. It also has some really spectacular architecture, many interesting neighborhoods, and tons of restaurants with great food. In the summer, there are street fairs every weekend. All of those things are what I, personally, enjoy in a vacation. Big city with lots of stuff to see and do? Fantastic. I went there as a tourist several times and enjoyed it so much that I moved there!
Just depends on what you like. Personally, I’m not particularly into swimming in tropical oceans. As I have already noted in this thread. 
What sort of museums are there and what notable exhibits are in them? I’m not disbelieving you, it’s just that I’m quite a museum fan myself and I can’t think of any “A-list” stuff I know to be in Chicago Museums off the top of my head the way I know there’s some incredible stuff in the British Museum, the Louvre, and even the Australian War Memorial… so I’d be interested to know what’s there so it can go on the “Stuff I really should see” list. 
Well, just off the top of my head, the Art Institute of Chicago is the home of Georges Seurat’s most famous painting:
ETA: And also Grant Wood’s:
I wasn’t all that impressed with Hawaii. Don’t get me wrong, it was VERY VERY pretty, but that’s all there was to do. Tourist around and look at this pretty spot and that pretty spot and this pretty bay, and that pretty rain forest-y area. I like to DO things on vacation (and not off in the woods getting eaten by mosquitoes accompanied by some man who’s lost his marbles because it’s FISHING SEASON!!! either). GIRL things, shopping, dancing, shows, FUN.
In case you didn’t notice 
I like to shop, and go to shows and go on waterpark rides and rollercoasters and stuff like that. For that reason, I actually LOVED Vegas. Not for the gambling or whatever, I think I may have put 11 bucks all told in slot machines, most of my time was spent shopping (AWESOME outlet stores out in the boonies there, Henderson maybe? It’s been since 2001 or 2002?), rollercoastering, riding, watching shows and cooling off in the various pools and the waterpark.
Of course the three times I’ve been there, the first time was as part of an online group, similar to a dopefest, called Trivia Travelers (old now dead VPLaces board), so there were about 30 of us, not counting the local members. Then twice with a guy I was dating from CA. (AK, CA, it was never meant to work :D).
IMHO, the best museum in Chicago is the Art Institute. I’ve been to a lot of art museums in and I think it’s up there with the best in the world. It has a really spectacular collection of impressionist art especially. My parents are from California and pretty disdainful of the Midwest as a region of rednecks and morons and when they came to visit me I don’t think they were expecting much when I took them here. They ended up being so impressed they went back a second time, when I was at work. Besides all the fine art, they also have a huge collection of armor and weapons, which are fascinating.
I used to be a docent at the Field Museum, so I am somewhat partial to it. The best thing at the Field is Sue, the largest and best-preserved T-Rex ever found.
Just down the road from the Field is Shedd Aquarium, the second-best aquarium I’ve ever been to (after the Monterey Bay Aquarium). It has a lot of really fantastic stuff.
The Museum of Science and Industry is a bit schizophrenic as a museum, but in a delightfully weird sort of way. The most prominent exhibit is probably the U-Boat. Which I do not recommend visiting if you’re at all claustrophobic. :eek:
Those are just the biggies. There are a number of other smaller specialized museums.
I like the coal mine ride myself.
Well, in fairness, you’re not supposed to stop for the lights, and the crosswalks aren’t anything more than suggestions. The only meaningful “Don’t Walk” sign is a *specific *car that will *actually *hit you.
As far as big cities are concerned, New York is generally considered to be the quintessential pedestrians’ town, AFAIK.
If there’s anything this thread shows it’s how widely tastes differ.
I will also concur with Dublin though. Loved Belfast though.
Who on earth considers it a pedestrians town? compared to which cities? Have you been to many other cities around the world?
Paris, London, Salzburg, Amsterdam, Munich, Hong Kong, Sydney?
In all of those you get changes of scenery, architecture, back streets, parks and they are all much easier to walk through.
New York isn’t a bad place to visit, it has many things to commend it and a wonderful alive “buzz” but for somewhere to stroll through it really isn’t visually interesting or user friendly enough for me.
That’s a shame. Being one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world, Toronto does have a LOT of flavour, but you really know where to find it, and amazingly the one time I was helping tourists with directions I was amazed at how dull their “scenic guide” was. There is a mall in Chinatown - and our Chinatown is one of the largest in North America which is why it’s used in so many films and TV shows - and if you go inside, it feels like you’ve left the country entirely. You’ll likely be the only non-Asian in the place and almost no one speaks English.
Their guide failed to mention Kensington Market AT ALL. :eek: That place would have been the outright coolest place EVER for me from the ages of 14-18. I would have absolutely, unabashedly LOVED it! My relatives in their 60s thought it was awesome and spent the entire day there enjoying walking around despite the rain. But no. The guide focussed mainly on the CN Tower and the Eaton Center (a big mall, whoopee!), the old Fort which isn’t particularly interesting compared to the tons of old forts you see elsewhere in North America. I feel very, very sad for tourists coming to Toronto if all they have to rely on their visit is from the tourism board. Dreadful and dull stuff.
It is true that the tomb was looted, but the breakage of (many of) the warriors was not generally vandalism - it was caused by the original wooden roof falling in.
When I was there, you could see some of the warriors still partly buried. And there were certainly many of them - it looked like thousands.
I’ve pretty much enjoyed everywhere I’ve gone. But gambling at the Lisboa Casino in Macau was something of a letdown. Pales in comparison with Vegas. I was just in the one casino, but it’s supposed to be the top one, at least it was at the time (1995). No drinking at the gaming tables. There was one bar in the basement in a roomful of slot machines, but you had to drink at the bar itself and not take your glass over to a slot. The blackjack dealers were dour. No sense of fun like at Circus Circus.