{"id":73,"date":"2007-01-29T19:00:27","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T19:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/?p=73"},"modified":"2007-01-29T19:01:09","modified_gmt":"2007-01-29T19:01:09","slug":"cities-and-villages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/life\/2007\/01\/cities-and-villages\/","title":{"rendered":"Cities and Villages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This weekend I visited friends in Leeds. I had a good time and like usual when I travel by train, the pleasure started before I arrived. I spent a leisurely few hours starting to read the intriguing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.webster.edu\/~corbetre\/personal\/reading\/kundera-unbearable.html\">&#8220;Unbearable lightness of being&#8221;<\/a>. We drank too much and played too much poker but we did visit an <i>extremely<\/i> good <a href=\"http:\/\/www.yorkshire-escapes.com\/content\/view\/131\/40\/\">Italian restaurant<\/a>. I&#8217;ve also hurt my arm playing <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wii_Sports\">Wii Boxing<\/a>; injured playing a computer game? What a wuss!<\/p>\n<p>Sat in a Burger King in London on the way home trying to avoid catching the attention of a (drunk? high? crazy?) bloke a couple of tables away I remembered why I&#8217;m often more comfortable in the small towns I&#8217;m used to. In tiny villages strangers may make small talk (&#8220;Awful weather isn&#8217;t it?&#8221;), in towns ignoring each other seems entirely normal. Large cities, on the other hand seem to have more people you have to <strong>actively<\/strong> ignore. If 1 in 5000 people are obnoxious, crazy or intoxicated enough to be unpleasant to strangers you&#8217;ll basically never see such people in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.channel4.com\/4homes\/ontv\/best&#038;worst\/2006\/winchester.html\">Winchester<\/a> whilst a typical trip across London will often include multiple encounters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This weekend I visited friends in Leeds. I had a good time and like usual when I travel by train, the pleasure started before I arrived. I spent a leisurely few hours starting to read the intriguing &#8220;Unbearable lightness of being&#8221;. We drank too much and played too much poker but we did visit an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}