The question of a “non-tourist destination” has never crossed my mind. Well, not until I happened upon one today. The city of Norilsk, in Siberia, was completely off limits to tourists until a short while ago, and that’s not to say that it’s any more accessible now. A permit is required to go in.
Throughout the Web it's known as "The worst city to live". How else would you describe a city where life expectancy is just 46 years old, where low temperature is around minus 55ºC, where snow is black because of pollution and where trees hunch bare and lifeless within a 48 kilometre radius due to acid rain?
Norilsk is a young city that was born into existence with one main purpose: mining development. This has quickly placed it at the world's top ten of the most polluted cities.
The most fascinating thing about this impossible urban phenomenon is the fact that we can't find another city with more than 100.000 inhabitants which is so close to the Pole. It's the biggest, most northern city in the world.
Don't you find the decadence of this city kind of attractive? Isn't it curious?
Below you can watch an interesting video about Norilsk.
We will never be able to see it with our own eyes. Nevertheless, if Norilsk ever was open to tourism, only a few people brave enough would muster the courage to venture deep into this city to discover such a different kind of life.
Boredom has a bearing on this literature thing. Generally, art is being subject to capital, money or workplace mobility rather than creation for the sake of it.
We are going to know how drug addicts most of the artists were (why Nietzsche said that inebriation was necessary for the artist). We are going to soften literature up and know language’s curiosity. We will be criticised and we will criticise. Interaction, conversation and different opinions are the result of the few conclusions that can be reached in the terms we deal with.
So we will smile and remember our beloved Valle-Inclán as the infinite main character of a role model. We are potentially crazy and we actually can make it happen.
Spoiler: Charles Baudelaire is probably the best French’s History poet ever, author of The Flowers of Evil and the man who introduced Romanticisim in many ways. He was affected by opium abuse during the writing of this work. Will we have to take opium to become a Romantic? Who could consider a Romantic oneself? Maybe we should claim ourselves other adjectives when writing teen letters with perfidious puking rainbows and other liquid caramels that will end up dried up. That’s ephemeral, as happiness.
By the way, pain came first, then pleasure. Ezotawenotó.
Joseda.
