For me it was Brasov in Romania. It was more beautiful than I had expected and really liked the vibes of this medieval city.
Funny enough for me it was also a Romanian town - Constanta.
Actually a fairly nice city with even nicer surroundings.
Nice place.
Despite the really bad reviews by the famous Roman poet Ovid, who was banned to Constanta, it is a really nice city.
Lol. Didn’t know about Ovid. Another reason to hate the guy.
Tbh, I stayed at efforie, a bit further south.Also absolutely lovely place.
I had a trip to Constanta and the danube delta scheduled… But then Covid happened and the war - sadly there is zero chance to persuade the wife to go to the Delta while the Ukrainian side is under fire.
Anyway, I will be back. (I live close to the beginning of the Danube and that would be fairly interesting to see the end. Additionally we are often in the Delta of the Po which is quite similar - and we love it there)
San Antonio. I was going to visit family and honestly was dreading it, but the downtown core is surprisingly pleasant. Extremely walkable, semi easy to get around, and the river walk is honestly pretty nice. (Not nice nice, I’d say it’s like a Vegas lite, everything is a little garish, but not too much).
Getting outside of SA was annoying though, car centric hellhole, endless sprawl, no way to get around. But - downtown is nice.
Merida in Mexico. It’s not a tourist city, but I was there during a weekend and there were all sort of family events organized at the market, it was really fun and inclusive. We sat down to watch a kids play and got brought into the play as “ghosts” (we’re white) so the kids would run up to us and pretend to be scared (we’d play it up), and at the end everyone gathered around us and thanked us for being sports. The rest of the day was just an immersion in actual Mexican culture and friendliness.
Not what I expected just dropping into the city on the way to see ruins, we stayed an extra couple days just to enjoy it. Maybe it’s gotten more urban and stand-offish, this would have been a decade ago.
