I assign to the shire:
After seven hours on a plane, a far green country and a swift sunrise*. Tube stations that, though they look old and dilapidated, have touches like fancy columns or mosaics or such things, hostels that cost 10 pounds a night yet have rooms with high ceilings, huge windows and beautiful architecture you would only see in expensive hotels in the US, trains that come every two minutes, mist and fog and air so wet it's like a sauna, and everything damp and green, with richer, darker colors, blue-green grass, seeing Bellini and Titian paintings from two inches away, recordings reminding one to “mind the gap” and “caution, you are approaching the end of the conveyor”, decibel levels in public places roughly half the US equivalent, little shops with all sorts of fresh produce in baskets in front of them, warm, friendly well-read people with melodic accents, tropical looking plants growing outdoors in people's gardens and black and white tiled paths to the door, tiny little electric cars, signs that tell you “look right” and “look left” when you cross the road, the feeling of being in Middle earth, in a Dickens story, in a place where human beings have lived since prehistory – a place that is old and full of memory.
*Without being dead/unable to return!
