An amusingly naive ranking of other people's hometowns

Many caveats. Among them:

1. I was dizzy with hunger and fatigue when I recorded this, which may explain why I used the word “amazing” four hundred times.
2. My priorities (expense, bicycle-friendliness, ease of public transportation, beer, food, music — roughly in that order) are perhaps unhelpfully idiosyncratic.
3. I nearly cried real tears when I left Seoul. But as Hyman Roth said in "Godfather II," "This is the business we've chosen." We're consumers of travel and have choices.
4. All of the destinations I mention are eminently worth visiting.
5. Calling Cremona “the Wisconsin of the U.S.” was an enormous flub. I was trying to make a broader point about the province of Lombardy. To be precise, Cremona is the, um, La Crosse of Italy. It’s a little hard to get in and out of, the nearest airport being hours away.
6. I significantly underplayed the beauty of Turin’s natural setting. It is a knockout. But its gilded baroque coffeeshops, like Vienna’s, just aren’t for me.
7. I wasn’t hard enough on Amsterdam. Until the city fathers get mopeds off the segregated bike paths, the bicycle scene there is not what it’s cracked up to be. And you can count the number of excellent beer bars on less than one hand.
8. Istanbul is singularly unforgettable, and I forgot to mention the water taxis, which considerably up its convenience and visual appeal. Just stay in Beyoglu or the Asian side — anywhere but Sultanahmet. When I visited in 2011, many websites were blocked by the judiciary, and musclebound plainclothes police continue to make sure free speech remains an abstract concept. (See: Taksim, 2013.) Still, it could have been in the top spot had I chosen my living quarters more wisely.
9. My view of Cairo is skewed because I arrived during Ramadan three weeks after the coup, but I insist its historical weight more than makes up for a surfeit of inconveniences. On the debit side of the ledger, El-Sisi, a mollusk of a man and darling of the American right, is another in a long line of dictators whose secret police just happened to kill dozens of people per night during my visit for the crime of being too Muslim. Though low-level lawlessness is widespread, it is safer to walk down a dark alley since the general took power, and I suspect now is a better time to go. The average uniformed policeman is benign, and tourists are generally treated as precious cargo.
10. Drivers will wait 30 seconds, longer even, to make a right turn in Berlin because they are checking behind them for bicycles. To my mind, this is the true measure of a city.