It is impossible to express how stunning the pyramids are. I was driving along and suddenly they were THERE…taking up about a quarter of the horizon while still being a LONG way off.
It made me proud to be part of a species that had pulled that off.
I was going to just post this. NYC is amazing. I also found Edinburgh more spectacular than I would ever have imagined. I was only passing through on a journey elsewhere but I was taken aback by its striking beauty.
Wow, I get to be the first one to post this. The Taj Mahal is truly as impressive and as moving as it would seem. I still count it as one of my best experiences ever, hands down.
The Great Wall of China
The Terra Cotta Army
The Colosseum
Seurat’s “Sunday on the Isle…”
The St. Louis Arch
Giant sequoias
Rosario Dawson
Having just been to Greece, I’ll have to say pretty much the whole of the Acropolis. It’s along the same lines as the pyramids in the “Holy crap, how did they DO that??” factor.
Half Dome. While getting up Half Dome itself and the views from the top are incredible, the hike to Half Dome is even moreso. Where else can you stand on a bridge and look over the edge of a waterfall? On the final portion of the trail just before the open rock section near HD, you see sheer granite walls 1000s of feet high and hear waterfalls. Pictures and descriptions are inadequate.
Many of the monuments in Washington DC can’t be caught except by seeing them. Others have mentioned the Vietnam Wall, but the Lincoln Memorial and Einstein monument have to be seen up close. It’s also hard to get the scale of the National Mall unless you walk it.
I go to battlefields and the two most impressive I’ve seen was Antietam (especially the sunken road) and the Battle of Bennington. The latter is situated on the top of a hill, making you wonder how the hell the colonists managed to attack it.
Alcatraz prison is also pretty impressive.
Sydney Opera House.
I didn’t think much of it till I saw the real thing.
I have yet to see another work of art that is so amazing in person. This truly has to be seen to be appreciated.
The whole of the Na Pali coast on Kauai – from sea, land (Kalalau Trail), or air. It’s simply spectacular.
Lots of famous art. Guernica is fucking amazing in real life, and Picasso’s earlier representational pieces definitely hinted at his future greatness. Prints of most art don’t do the real thing any justice, I found. I had the same experience as Jenaroph in “getting” some artists like Pollock for the first time.
You also realize, seeing the stuff by greats mixed in with other notables, that they really do deserve the recognition. I’m not a huge art person, so I actually know only the most recognizable pieces by most famous artists. Paintings that caught my attention from across the room almost always were lesser-known pieces from great artists. There were a few that weren’t by people I knew of already, but those were exceptions.
The Himalayas are also way up there. When you look out the window of a commercial jet and see bloody Everest so high up that it looks like you could scrape a wing on it, it makes an impression. I’ve flown over the Rockies several times, and while that is a big stretch of rough ground, the sheer scale and precipitousness of the Himalayas is a whole different league of awesome.
Even minor Roman aqueducts make you wonder how in the hell people could ever move rocks that huge with nothing but rope, wooden beams, and muscle.
The Colosseum.
My jaw literally dropped when I first got a glimpse of it.
Certainly the Grand Canyon. It’s really impossible to comprehend without seeing it for real. Even when I was there, it was pretty impossible to comprehend.
I also found the Taj Mahal to be one of the few monuments that I found to be even more stunning in reality than I expected it to be.
The Eiffel Tower. It’s hard to understand just how frikkin’ big it is without seeing it first hand. From the top, it’s perhaps more impressive than the Empire State Building because there are no other buildings nearly so tall around it.
Uluru (Ayers Rock) and the Australian Outback.
Niagra falls is spectacular in every sense of the word.
The Golden Gate Bridge…and I grew up in the Bay Area, so it’s not like I don’t see it very often.
And some of the buildings with very little reputation for awesomeness are truly extraordinary. The Library of Congress, for example, is stunningly beautiful on the inside. Of course, the National Cathedral is gorgeous inside and out.
Crap…I didn’t even know there was an Einstein Memorial. :eek:
Zion National Park was by far the most beautiful and impressive place I’ve seen in person. The Grand Canyon paled in comparison.
Carmina Burana has to be heard live.
I found Central Park to be underwhelming.
Essentially all art is better in person but notable examples are:
Kandinsky: no reproduction does any justice to just how vibrant the colours are.
Minimalist art, for example, this piece by Guido Molinari, on a computer screen or a book looks like crap. In real, though, it’s literally dancing before your eyes.
The Borghese Gladiator: you really have to walk around it to appreciate the dynamism of the pose, and see it up close to understand just how fine and life-like the details are.
Gerhard Richter’s landscape paintings. At a certain distance, you’d swear it’s a photograph. Walk a step closer, and it’s clearly a painting. The effect is lost when you’re looking at a photographic reproduction of a painting that’s itself a reproduction of a photograph.
The Sainte Chapelle: photographs cannot even give you a hint of its magnificence.
Teotihuacan: it’s not Giza, but these are some very, very impressive pyramids.
Mount Fuji: you’ve seen it in thousands of photographs, paintings, logos, but you haven’t seen it until you’ve seen it.
El Árbol del Tule: the first time I went to see it, at first I thought it was a park. No, it’s just one tree. The second time I went to see it, at first I thought it was a park. No, it’s still just one tree.