The Sears Tower. Yeah, it’s kinda cool seeing it from way outside the city, and the view up top is interesting, but it just doesn’t seem that tall when you’re actually in the city. Maybe it’s an optical illusion.
The cathedral itself is far more interesting.
I dunno. I live here, and it seems pretty fucking tall when I’m in the Loop. The only big letdown I’ve seen so far is Mt. Rushmore. I’ve always expected it to be a hell of a lot bigger, and then when we saw it in person on a family trip in high school, I was absolutely astounded at how relatively small it was. I was expecting a scale of something like the nearby Mount Crazy Horse.
Was this back when you could still walk around inside? The two times I went to Stonehenge it was still accessible, and I found it fascinating. Nowadays I wouldn’t bother to make the trip to squint at a distance. (But I do understand why the change was made.)
The Arc de Triomphe doesn’t do anything for me.
I damn near walked past the Rosetta Stone. It’s pretty inconspicuous.
An American museum would have built an entire Interpretive Center around it, complete with interactive kiosks and an on-site library. The British Museum just sticks it in the corner of a larger exhibit of I forget what all.
Went to a taping of The Price Is Right about fifteen years ago and couldn’t believe what the studio actually looked like. Not that it looks like the Sistine Chapel on TV, but jeez. Dinky, dimly lit and cheap looking.
Hoover Damn.
First off, it took us forfuckingever to get to it. There’s just a one-lane-each-way narrow road that leads to it, the road services not just damn traffic but commercial traffic as well- including large trucks that have to slow to a near stop to navigate the multiple 180o turns weaving through the mountain passes.
Another cause of the barely moving traffic I didn’t notice until we got to the damn: a pedestrian crosswalk crossing the damn itself (over which the thru road passes). There’s no traffic light for pedestrains to wait for, just everytime any pedestrian steps onto the crosswalk the traffic stops- even if only one vehicle was able to pass after stopping for the previous pedestrain. Traffic was backed up for miles. Having never been to it before, we spent nearly two hours in Nevada July heat inching forward thinking “hopefully it is just around this next bend.”
Then, at the actual damn, the only thing you can do for free is to walk along top of it (and stop traffic walking across it). I get having to pay for the damn tour, but- pay to read things on the wall of the damn visitor center? Really? We can’t just read about it without paying admission?
The Hoover Damn totally sucks- no wonder they named it after a vacuum cleaner.
I dunno, I thought it was awfully cool. I went a few months before they finally managed to stop its tipping, so there were these gigantic support wires and weights and stuff. It was also tipping a fair bit more then than it is now.
Second on the church being fun – but it and the baptistry were as uneven as the tower! It was absolutely incredible in that sense. Plus, all the marble has been pilfered from elsewhere, and it was fun to read upside-down text on the walls and look at the different colours of the stones.
meant to put this in “most impressive”–sorry
The Roman Forum struck me as a nondescript rock pile.
The tour guide who was with us had a book with actual pictures of the forum which she then covered with a dolled up transparency that displayed what it looked like back in the day. Well, hell I thought, you could do the same with the city dump and call it a tourist spot and it would work just as well.
[quote=“bienville, post:27, topic:478229”]
Hoover Damn.
Another cause of the barely moving traffic I didn’t notice until we got to the damn: a pedestrian crosswalk crossing the damn itself (over which the thru road passes). There’s no traffic light for pedestrains to wait for, just everytime any pedestrian steps onto the crosswalk the traffic stops- even if only one vehicle was able to pass after stopping for the previous pedestrain.
[QUOTE]
.
A gazillion dollars to build the thing and they havent put in a pedestrian overpass?:smack:
Another vote for the Sphinx. In person, it is actually quite small and unimpressive.
Also Cape Cod. I don’t see the appeal. We drove out one day during our year in Massachusetts. Went to Hyannis and Hyannis Port. Meh. Crummy town with shitty beaches. What’s the big deal? There must be something to it if the Kennedys built their vacation home there, but damned if we could see what it was.
Since 9/11 most trucks are supposed to bypass Hoover Dam. I guess they are afraid of someone bombing it. They take another road that is a longer route.
Also they are building a new bridge right near the dam that will take all the traffic off the dam. It is supposed to open in 2010.
For me it was the opposite. I went there expecting a tourist trap, and instead was awed. The smallness of the place just emphasizes how desperate they were to defend it, and how alone they were when they died. All along I’d been hearing “the shrine of Texas Independence,” and that’s where I understood.
My visit was pre-9/11. By the time we parked I was just about ready to bomb the damn thing myself.
New Hampshire’s late lamented Old Man of the Mountain. The first two times I went there as a kid, I took the hype too much to heart and thought the whole side of the mountain was supposed to look like a face. I just couldn’t see it. It was only on the third trip I realized I was supposed to be looking at this tiny little inconspicuous outcropping of rock a third of the way up the mountain that you could barely see without binoculars and that sort of kind of looked like a face if you stood in just the right spot, squinted your eyes, and turned your head slightly to the left. My cynicism I date from this episode.
I agree with most of the places already mentioned, especially Cape Cod, the Mona Lisa, The leaning tower, and I would add St Pauls cathedral in Rome (I found Notre Dame in Paris to be far more impressive)
But for me, the winner will always be Uluhru, otherwise known as Ayers Rock Australia. I didnt mind the three days travel just to get there, because, well, I was backpacking, traveling was kinda the point.
But to get there and see what is basically a big rock was a real disappointment. Dont get me wrong, I didnt expect the Rock to get up and start dancing or anything, but I really didnt get any sense of awe or splendor from it. My reaction was just, “Well, there it is…what next?”
I suspect a large part of the problem was the sheer volume of tourists who are there every day. Its hard to make a connection with this huge monolith when busloads of people all milling about with cameras clicking furiously. I think it would be a vastly different experience to be alone in the bush, with nobody else around for hundreds of miles, and to then come upon this massive rock as the sun rises.
(Most impressive? The Hong Kong symphony of Sound and Light. Had never heard of it until I was standing watching it, thought it was amazing)
I have a picture of the Pantheon in Rome… taken from a table in front of the McDonalds across the street.
It may not be very wide, but it’s long. 
That was kind of disappointing and cool, simultaneously, about Rome. You could be walking through modern, commercial streets and stumble upon something very old and wonderful.
(I bought a drink at that McDonald’s so I could use their bathroom with a clear conscience, so I don’t hate that particular location. 
)
The Alamo made me impressed with the camera skills of the videographers for those History Channel shows, since I know I’ve seen modern footage of the place and you can’t tell it’s smack-dab in the middle of the city, right up to the sidewalk on most sides. When I rode past it on the airport shuttle, I assumed it was a modern “Old West”-themed building. Then we rounded the corner and I saw the signs and such.
Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello. It’s just a crappy old house with a really bad paint job.