Prague, definitely. My wife and I went there for the honeymoon. I would also nominate Lisbon. And Venice in winter, when the tourists have gone and are replaced by fog.

Modern Prague continues to exhibit this sense of sly playfulness, as evidenced by a major gallery exhibit at the Kampa Museum of Modern Art consisting of huge plastic bears and rabbits, along with a huge wicker chair by the river, suitable for a giant. Not to mention a fine memorial to John Lennon opposite the Old Town, where thousands of people a year come to pay tribute.

As a modern, thriving metropolis, Prague by day or by night contains so many imaginative surprises that even cynical travelers can be amazed by it. Walking around a corner in the evening, with the old town area lit up like some fairy tale setting, we have stumbled across impromptu concerts, street theater, puppetry, and stunning exhibits of international photography.

But one discovery exemplified for us the magical nature of Prague. Walking through the gardens overlooking city, we heard faint music coming from a high hedge. We soon found a narrow break in the shrubbery that led to a little beer bar with a radio and seats made from tree stumps with green felt as upholstery. Although it was the summer, holiday lights had been woven through the gnarled trees. In the back lay a delicate gazebo set amidst a forest of vines and strange metal sculptures.

I’d have to say Prague because of its dual fantastical/playful nature–and the unexpected nature of its beauty and creativity. It’s what got me thinking about doing this Shared Worlds feature in the first place.

That’s also because I wouldn’t want to pick a city I’d just read about, but one I had visited. I wrote about Prague for Locus Online recently:

http://www.locusmag.com/2009/VanderMeer_Prague.html

Excerpt:

To us, there may be no more fantastical city than Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, situated on the banks of the Vltava River. Its roots in fantasy go much deeper than Franz Kafka, who once lived in a room in the city’s walls. They also go deeper than the tale of the Golem, one of Prague’s most famous fictitious exports.

A penchant for the fantastical seems to come naturally to Czechs, perhaps nowhere more in evidence than Jaroslav Hasek’s tales of the good soldier Svejk. In these absurd stories, Svejk’s fabrications become ever more bizarre and grandiose, and yet fool everyone with the sincerity and detail of their telling. In one particular tale, Svejk claims to have discovered such oddities as the Sulphur-Bellied Whale, the Edible Ox, and Sepia Infusorium, a kind of sewer rat.

Liam: Yep, Jerusalem is definitely an interesting one! The mix of modernity with old-world startled me at first – you sort of expect it to be frozen in the past in a kind of reverence for its holiness – but people, cities, and life move on. One of the funniest things I heard when I was there was a piece of irreverance from a cabdriver: “the best thing about Jerusalem is the road to Tel Aviv” – because to Israelis it’s not just a grand historic setting but also a city like any other, subject to the same petty rivalries and idiosyncrasies. Until I came there I never fully thought of it as a place where people live.

New York’s pretty amazing for an outsider. I suppose it’s a cliched one but the image of the steam pouring out of the grates in the winter is the one that’s stuck with me most – it’s like the city’s visibly breathing… It’s Gotham and every East Coast industrial Noir metropolis you’ve ever imagined right there in bricks and concrete. Everyone’s been to New York even if they haven’t – you can’t really say the same about every other city…

One of the oddest things about London is that it’s such a fractured place: within the historic centre (a suprisingly small area) it might seem like a thoroughly coherent whole but London’s far more than just that part, lots of smaller mini-cities/towns collected together under the banner of ‘London’ but really with very separate identities. It’s so different, and seems so separated, from north to south and east to west that sometimes we get a bit clannish about it: I don’t class myself as a Londoner as much as a South Londoner even though I haven’t lived there for years. Of course, when using it as inspiration for the fantastic these distances and differences tend to become exagerrated… Although ‘The City & The City’ has made me think more about the nature of borders, how they’re more mental than anything else. As China Mieville says it’s a “shoved together” patchwork that’s always growing as the great beast that is London consumes and subsumes its surroundings, taking in new people from all over the place, getting fatter and fatter and more and more of a mishmash.

On the other hand, I live in New York City, which is pretty amazing as well.