[ul]
[li]Great museums, especially art museums[/li][li]A real sense of history with some nice historical sites.[/li][li]A tourist trap (just for a visit – I love them).[/li][li]Subways/elevateds/light rail to get around[/li][li]Great food. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but there should be plenty of great restaurants. Ideally, you should be able to walk into any restaurant and get a great meal.[/li][li]Nice scenic views, usually with water.[/li][li]Lots of sights within walking distance of each other.[/li][/ul]
Good street good and cheap, plentiful beer. I want to spend $5.00 on dinner and come home stuffed.
Warm weather. I like to enjoy evenings outside.
A good hostel: The kind of place with board games, a nice kitchen, books to read and lots of people hanging around to go exploring and swap travel stories with. Must have a deck, garden or other outdoor hangout.
Friendly people. I have the most fun when I am sharing meals, visiting home, and otherwise hanging out with local residents.
At least one sidewalk cafe that serves good, western style coffee. Ideally, chocolate croissants should also be available. A used book store with English language books is also appreciated.
Some kind of religious site. A temple, mosque, whatever. Bonus pints if it’s old.
a cheesy discotheque to dance in at least one night.
A nice market. Night markets with street food are the best type. Artisan markets are also awesome, especially if items are made on site.
Finally, natural beauty is a nice touch. A mountain to climb, beach to relax at, river to sit beside, or at the very least some trees and a blue sky.
Oh, and I forgot! I have a thing for unpopular museums. The kind of place where they have to run down the street to find a caretaker to turn on the lights and wipe down the dust.
A great city to visit must have good public transportation, and if it’s a unique kind, so much the better. It should also be really walkable. The more street life the better.
I was just in Baltimore for a weekend. We took the water taxi to Inner Harbor from Fell’s Point, where we were staying…and there just happened to be a Pirate festival going on. The place was crawling with wenches and buccaneers! It was a real treat.
Definitely public transportation, with the availability of day passes and widespread enough to let you go pretty much everywhere you want to. I’m a New Yorker, and so used to good subways, but I was incredibly impressed by Berlin.
I don’t mind a souvenir shop or two, but I’d prefer that there be far more real stores then souvenir places. The worst in this regard are little towns in Alaska which get flooded with cruise ship passengers and whose main streets are 99% souvenir places.
A good diversity of museums. Art, history and science.
Accessible from your means of entry. I much prefer taking public transportation from the airport. One reason I like Stockholm was that we could pop off the cruise ship, walk a few blocks, and pop onto the Metro.
As far as shopping goes, stores which are unique to the area and which you can’t find everywhere. There are still department stores in Europe like the ones I went to as a kid, with more than clothes and housewares if you are lucky. Looking at local food, even in high class stores, is great. Also, lots of specialty shops.
I’ve seen both Princeton and Boulder go from having downtowns with lots of quirky store to downtowns that could be a high class mall. What a waste.
I often enjoy returning to a city more than my first visit. Then I can just roam around, with no goal in mind, and find interesting things that I overlooked the first time. I once spent a week in Paris during a general strike. The city was pretty much shut down, with no transportation at all. I had a great time just absorbing the streets and happenings. I can’t imagine enjoying that in more than a handful of cities.
I think it boils down to how it compares to where you live normally:
The things that are worse in your hometown are better in the new city.
Things that are expensive are cheap.
Things that are low quality are higher quality.
Hard things are easy.
etc. etc. etc.
For all the comments above of what people pointed out, I can virtually guarantee that their hometown is the opposite.
A city that’s got its own unique identity, whether it be because of the architecture or the setting or the history or the people…whatever. There’s no other city in the world like it.
Its own unique identity is interesting and appealing to me.
There are plenty of things to do and see there that directly relate to this identity – whether it be historic locations, museums, natural wonders, etc.
I don’t have to be extra concerned about my safety while visiting.
For me, it’s a way of life/mode of being that seems really different from what I’m used to. I want to be thinking, wow if I lived here my life would be so different in x,y, z ways. Since I already live in a huge city with top museums, food, arts, culture, and nightlife, it’s got to offer some unique and intangible experience beyond that.