For 70 years the capital of Bangladesh is impossible to imagine without colourful pedicabs (bike taxis), successfully replacing taxi for Dhaka residents. Every inch of such cart is covered with drawings, the same as body of a rock musician is covered with tattoos, and drivers behave so confident as if the whole city belongs to them.

The city of elegant bridges and mazelike streets, fouled on the map as if a headphones carelessly flung into a pocket. A place that gave name to the whole country and an alcohol drink that used to pack a punch for rugged sailors. The capital’s main rival and the pride of the North in its opposition to the South. We’re talking about Porto – Portugal’s second business and industrial centre after Lisbon and all-in-all one of key South European metropolises.

Destined to be a port, Rotterdam became the most non-Dutch city of the country. It is the only city in the Netherlands headed by Muslim mayor, it is also a home for the largest Caribbean diaspora and even has its own China Town. Innate inhabitants and comers are almost equally numbered here. But if we look seven centuries back, we will see only a modest settlement on the Rotte River protected by dam from floods.

The week passed in a desperate anticipation of vacations. I’ve been enthusiastically terrorizing GoogleMaps zooming in and out the precious dot of terrain against the background of deep blue ocean turn and turn about. At a reduced scale I saw open jaws of the Hollywood Alien, impudently teased by a midge at its very nostrils.

Braşov is the heart of Romania with the German valves. Saxon spirit is insistently living in the houses with gingerbread roofs, and sounds in the bell ringing of Catholic Cathedral, the largest in Eastern Europe. Even the gates look waiting not for tourists but medieval knights.

For more than 50 years a World Day of Twin Cities falls on the last Sunday of April. The beginning of the World War II is considered to be a starting point of town-twinning. Enthusiasts from Coventry – a major industrial centre of England which survived intense bombing by the Nazis – sent to the Soviet Stalingrad, the city of the same level of industrial development and population, letter supporting confrontation to Hitler. In return they got a warm and appreciative response.

Morning, as we know from commercials, starts with coffee while July is welcomed in Ukraine with the Architect’s Day. Through the Golden Gates of Kiev – first significant landmark – entered a thousand-year-long era of urban development with very own style. Splendor of palaces and shine of churches’ domes, might of castles and austerity of soviet realism – this is the façade of architectural Ukraine. However we will try and enter through a back door.

On May, 19, 1897 Oscar Wilde got liberty after having spent eighteen month in Reading jail. Imprisonment changed root and branch of a magnificent wit and drew a sad line under his literary activities. At the same time, Wilde wasn't the first nor was he the last artist in words who felt the mercilessness of the system of justice on himself.