Madrid is meh IMO. It's got some cool museums and the discos and party scene in general is amazing but otherwise it pretty much just feels like any other huge city.

I could be biased here since I grew up in a small town but unlike Barcelona there is nothing special about Madrid IMO.

I've spent a fair amount of time researching places to live outside of the US. I haven't really poured over the rules for every single country but from the European countries that I did look into, they don't let you stay in the country indefinitely unless you get a work visa etc. So if you want to live in Europe as a poker player you'd have to move around quite a bit - which actually seems fun and it's something I'd like to do after living in Argentina for a while. Italy in particular seems very interesting. Morocco seems like it would be a fun place to go in the winter but not speaking Arabic seems to be a huge problem.

Asia also seems sorta interesting, although by Asia I really mean the islands nearby. Hong Kong, Singapore, maybe Kuala Lumpur (public transit seems poor, though). Teipei? Bangkok. And Tokyo I suppose.

Pahrump, Nevada. Its the most surreal place I've ever been in my life

/discussion

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Wow.

The Onion is pretty great but gets old if you read/watch it regularly. It's been a long time and I found that hilarious.

canada seems neat, but it always shocks me when i realize people live in places like green bay, WI or potsdam, NY or buffalo or the like. and then i realize canada is ABOVE that. so yeah. maybe good for a visit though.

i've been to tha OC and grand junction. the OC was exactly like it is depicted on television in terms of the vibe, people, prices, etc., so i'll pass on that. grand junction, like the rest of CO along I-70 after Denver was very excellent.

this summer I'll prob be traveling x-country again, but likely the southern route, and I'll probably be hitting places like nashville, austin, tuscon anyway. hope they're neat and not like the rest of the south.

jared, thanks for that post, i did read it all. i would like to see a bullfight at some point in my life. the only thing you didn't mention is how they perceive outsiders. i am certainly not fluent (though i would study if i left for an extended period of time), so i'm sure i'd stick out. but sevilla probably sounds like the better fit, as i don't know the difference b/t spanish and catalan.

Don't live in Grand Junction unless you want to live within an afternoon drive to Vegas and want to live somewhere better than Utah.

how so? cause it has legal brothels and art bell and michael jackson apparently live there?

Actually reading what prompted Grand Junction.. I think Amp would love it.. and curious why he wouldn't live somewhere like that.

Pahrump doesn't come to mind when I think of someplace surreal. I mean, it's a surprisingly large small town in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. Umm, okay. So what? But then again, my experience with it is limited to driving past it and eating at Burger King, so maybe I missed out on something.

when i was living in reno and working on the house race there i spent one of the more bizarre 24 hours of my life in pahrump that did not involve a boat load of mushrooms. maybe its just me and not the city

if you go to monte carlo, TAKE THE HELICOPTER FROM NICE! its 7 minutes and its totally worth it. it was maybe the best thing about the entire trip, and it was only like 60E. breathtaking and totally sweet!!

never been there, but may go exploring one of these days soon since vegas is so dead. now you have me intrigued!

elaborate pls?

Reading this whole conversation really puts into perspective how sheltered my life has been to this point - I would really like to take some time and visit some cool places

I got around morocco with the french that i thought i had forgotten all of.
People were pretty friendly - so much so in fact that my inbuilt travellers cynicism led me to make a few decisions that were in retrospect mistakes.

OTOH, in barca, the cynicism was i think well founded - a lot of street crime there, and people kept asking whether I wanted them to take a picture of me and my wife when we weren't even taking photos/in anywhere photogenic. I kept telling them to **** off, and then later we saw an english couple complaining to some police that someone had run off with their camera.

also, Jared, +1 to andalucia. I only saw granada, but I totally loved the countryside, citrus and olive groves, snowy mountains, almond blossom, cheese, ham, wine, bread, what more do you need?

melbourne, and for that matter all of victoria, australia was awesome

my other 2 would be in italy and switzerland- both under the minimum population requirmenet you call for as are most cities in those countries :\

fwiw, salerno and lucerne. beautiful and laid back with tons of **** to do. excellent food, people, and sights. kind of vanilla though..

+1 for Marrakech and Morocco in general. I spent the Summer in Morocco, including 2 weeks in Marrakech. I had the time of my life and can see myself living there at some point in my life. There is so much going on there, I can happily spend whole days there, just wandering through the souks, listening to all the noises and smelling all of the fantastic (and less fantastic) smells. If anyone does choose to visit Marrakech, I would advise you to avoid going during Rammadan for your first visit. The people and the city change a lot during Rammadan and I think the changes were mostly negative.

I think I would need a second house somewhere more chilled, for when Marrakech just got to be too much. I would probably either go for Essaouira on the coast for the surfing and the sunsets or Chefchaouen in the Rif mountains with its sky blue buildings and Mediterranean feel.

We also visited the Cascades d'Ouzoud, which I assume are the waterfalls in question. It was a great day out. We bought a picnic while in Marrakech and took a taxi with a couple of French girls we met. The waterfalls are fairly impressive at about 110m for the main drop and many smaller drops separated by pools of calmer water all down the valley. We walked a fair way down the valley (long beyond where the paths ended so we were just wandering through the undergrowth along very steep muddy ground with flip flops on our feet) until we found a pool that we liked the look of. It had its own ~15m waterfall and a large, flat rock by the waters edge that was perfect for picnics / sunbathing. The water was a beautiful blue/green colour and was very refreshing. We didn't see another person all day. We did see a couple of monkeys though.

what's the advantage of Marrakech over someplace like Casablanca or Tangier?

from what i've read, cassablanca is maybe a bit industrial, and not so interesting. Marrakech is the capital, Fez(fes?) is supposed to be very nice, too.

Also, 'a year in marrakech', a fairly old book, is a 5* kokiri recommendation.

Rabat is the capital.

marrakech is the spiritual capital?

And I could be biased because Im used to living in a huge city, I dont want to say Madrid > Sevilla but your arguments for Sevilla are not very strong because they apply to all Spain as well.
- There is also bullfighting in Madrid( Im not even going to discuss the fact that putting this as a plus of Sevilla is questionable by itself)
- Soccer( this is by far ure worst argument, there is soccer on every important spanish city, ever heard of Real Madrid or Atletico?)
-I found hotter girls in Madrid than in Sevilla, of course this may just be coincidence because I didnt have such a big sample size, also it depends on which neighbourhood you are but I dont think that sevillanas are going to be hotter than girls from Madrid.


I like big cities because there is always more options to have a good time there, I think it depends but if somebody is from New York I think we will have a better time living in Madrid than in Sevilla.

Also I agree with Jared that spanish people seem to have a "lets chill" attitude.
Its probable that they dont have that in Barcelona, I wasnt there long enough, unfortunaly since Ive been having health problems Im not going to travel to the Basque countries or to Galicia( or to Hitch town) because I wouldnt feel safe traveling on my own with anxiety problems.

Casablanca I didn't really care for; It was a lot more westernised and industrial, a lot less friendly (being white seemed to make you a target to be ripped off by everyone - sadly for them it takes an awful lot to make me part with my cash) and the few nice parts of it seemed to be set up purely to milk tourists. We only stayed there as a stop off as we traavelled down the coast but I didn't feel the need to stay there a minute longer.

I didn't make it to Tangier so I don't know about there.

Fes I quite liked but its main attraction is the souks which I enjoyed wandering around but Marrakech had the souks and also other things to see and do. Fes' locals are also notoriously pushy towards foreigners, something that we experienced once there, which was never a problem in Marrakech.