Comment by rambambram

Lee Chapman does actual photo-walking tours of Tokyo and Osaka... sign ups are going on right now!

https://leechapman.photos/tokyo-photowalk-tours

http://edition.cnn.com/videos/travel/2016/08/11/tokyo-pov-le...

> Indeed, once in a while a Japanese sports car pops up around a corner, just standing there on somebody's driveway.

I worked for a Japanese company. My Japanese coworkers would do the exact same thing in cities like Miami. When they visited here, we saw a drop top Mustang and that was a bigger deal to them than any Porsche or Lambo.

There’s a show on Japanese television about touring Japan on bicycle which may or may not appeal to you https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/5115002/

Sibiu and Brasov in Romania; Krakow in Poland; Guanajuato, Zacatecas, San Miguel, Patzcuaro in Mexico; Merida and Campeche in Mexico (very different vibes, so separated), possibly Regensburg and Heidelberg in Germany

Hello fellow flâneur! Though you won’t get the same level of safety, I definitely recommend Paris as a destination to walk around. The city feels like a museum and you can end up finding all sort of random monuments and beautiful architecture along the way. Also some cool street art. Obviously use common sense and you’ll be fine.

PS: I did Tokyo quite a lot, Shanghai too, though you usually need to take the metro at some point. San Francisco is also great if you don’t mind the hills (and also use common sense).

For a long time, there was a livestream on Youtube that showed a part of Tokyo. Not sure which part, but there was a highway and railroad. And it was somehow soothing to me, because if it was night here, the sun would rise there. I always imagined myself there. I miss this stream.

There are many old and very walkable cities in the Netherlands, any of the larger ones would probably be nice.

Nice, Colmar, Basil, sections of Paris, Vienna, Barcelona and Madrid.

It’s fun to go to random places not know for their beauty, too. There are walking tour videos of basically everywhere. New Delhi and Huancayo are ones I recall finding interesting

Those FPV walks through various Japanese area videos, from channels like @4KJAPAN or @VIRTUALJAPAN, are strange because they actually make me feel like I've been there.

Like I have a memory of walking through Japan and it can be a bit jarring when I realize it was just a video I watched.

It feels as real to me as actual cities I've walked through. Like I remember my "walks" through various Japanese areas more vividly than my walks through Florence, Italy, or Brussels, Belgium, but I've actually been to the latter two.

A lot of Slow TV of trains rolling through Norway.

This is basically all I did during covid lockdowns, with a Quest VR headset. I explored the world. Spend afternoons in Paris, France and then I'm in Venice Italy. The neat thing is some of the museums in these cities have walk-throughs, so I got to visit a lot of museums too, as if I was walking around inside them looking around in VR.

Then I got an app for the VR headset that connected to a bike pedal sensor, and I rode a stationary bike all over the place. That was a lot of fun while being stuck inside for months.

The Philippines is great for streetview, wikipedia, random internet rabbit holes. You can just zoom in until you find some island somewhere and there's probably something interesting you can learn about it. If you're lucky there's a road with streetview on it, maybe a village, a church, etc. You can spend hours trying to figure out what's going on there.

Many of the islands don't even have wikipedia pages. You can spend hours just scouring the internet for information on what the heck is going on on some island. Sometimes you find the amateur website for a local school, or some account of a tourist or traveler going there and reporting what they found.

Sometimes you learn that there is an old Spanish graveyard that has since sunken underwater, the statues and tombstones and crosses now covered in coral and barnacles, with a single lone cross still visible above the sea.

Sometimes you learn that the village is a sprawling shantytown of fishing huts and thatched-roof shacks on precarious stilts 15 feet above the ocean.

Sometimes you learn that it's the site of a WWII battle or famous explorer visited the island or a plane crashed there in the 60s or some other interesting tidbit.

Sometimes you learn that it's been occupied by jihadist terrorists for the past 40 years and that in order to encourage foreign visitors (who might not want to go there due to numerous past kidnappings of foreigners for ransom), tourists are assigned a free, mandatory vanguard of heavily armed marine commandos as human shields to defend them whenever they go to the beach.

Sometimes you find a remote archipelago where every island seems to have a different christian denomination on it, like you have the island with the Mormon church, the one with the Catholic church, the one with the Iglesia ni Cristo church, the one with the Seventh Day Adventists, etc. etc. and you start to wonder how exactly that happened, and what the locals think about the weirdos on the island next door who got a very different story from the missionaries that came there than they did.

Sometimes it's just so obscure nobody has ever written anything about it in any language you know, you can see some blurry houses and rice paddies and outrigger canoes on the beach on satellite view but the village is otherwise unmarked, and you start to wonder, exactly what goes on there? Who are these people in this strange little fishing village with their canoes and rice paddies and corrugated-iron roof huts, what are they hiding, and how do I get there? And pretty soon you start looking at plane tickets and schedules and trying to imagine the complicated and uncertain logistics of traveling to such a remote place, because surely it's not that hard, there is an island only 30 miles away with an airstrip, beach villas and a handful of restaurants, and surely you could just fly there and charter a boat or something...