Maybe if I were in a plane. Austin is a green, hilly, tree-filled city; that's what I see when I look out the window or travel around, as opposed to vastness.
But it's also all only about 150 years old. London is about 2000 years old. There are buildings like the White Tower that are almost half that age, and churches about 300 years older yet, and of course ruins that are thousands of years older.
To be fair, much of the charm of England is not by design. Its people have always just been building by the standards of their times, like ours; its roads (in many cases) aren't designed for cars because there were no cars, not then and not for hundreds more years.
All the same I found it remarkably inspiring and in such an oddly familiar way. Even the weather seemed familiar, though in a different sense than the Austin weather I've known ever since I could remember.
And I think the world as a whole would be better if we could ditch cars, for the most part, and go back to walkable communities connected by rapid, clean-energy, mass transit like hyperloops (and of course the Internet).
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branchandroot
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Date: 2017-08-03 03:59 pm (UTC)But it's also all only about 150 years old. London is about 2000 years old. There are buildings like the White Tower that are almost half that age, and churches about 300 years older yet, and of course ruins that are thousands of years older.
To be fair, much of the charm of England is not by design. Its people have always just been building by the standards of their times, like ours; its roads (in many cases) aren't designed for cars because there were no cars, not then and not for hundreds more years.
All the same I found it remarkably inspiring and in such an oddly familiar way. Even the weather seemed familiar, though in a different sense than the Austin weather I've known ever since I could remember.
And I think the world as a whole would be better if we could ditch cars, for the most part, and go back to walkable communities connected by rapid, clean-energy, mass transit like hyperloops (and of course the Internet).