The Capitals of the G7 Countries, Ranked
On the occasion of having finally been to all of them
7. Ottawa
Sometimes I have friends who move to Ottawa, or to its lesser Quebec twin across the river, Gatineau. They get a job in the Canadian federal government or one of the tech companies there.1 My friends buy a house, adopt a dog, produce a kid or two. We try to keep in touch; they invite me to stay at their place if I ever visit. We’ll go see the Rideau Canal, they say. We’ll visit the Parliament House. Ottawa has a cool market street! We swear! I have made the mistake of accepting their invitation a couple of times. I don’t anymore. There is nothing for me in Ottawa. It is the butt of jokes about how people from Ontario are boring and have never had any fun. I have another category of friend, the ones who desperately want to escape Ottawa, either because they grew up there, or because, following a series of poor life choices, they found themselves forced to move there for work. I am like them, minus (I hope) the poor life choices. Despite having spent no more than three or four weekends there, I, too, desperately want to escape Ottawa.
6. Berlin
Berlin would be ranked higher if it weren’t for that dumb mistake I made in purchasing an S-bahn ticket for the wrong age group when I was there in January of 2015. The mistake cost me 40 euros, as well as some pain in the upper arm caused by the burly Middle Eastern security man who grabbed me, pulled me out of the train, and told the Schwarzfahrer I had unwittingly become that I had to either pay a fine now (and trust that this burly Middle Eastern security man was entitled to collect it) or come with him to explain myself to the police. I paid the fine and left the train station feeling very hateful about Germany. On the same trip (though I don’t actually remember if this was in Berlin or Hamburg; I’ll pretend it’s Berlin for narrative reasons), I got involved in another incident in which I was mistakenly identified as a thief. One of my hobbies at the time was to send out a lot of postcards, and I happened to stand just outside a convenience store where I had bought a drink when I looked at the postcards I was about to put in a mailbox. The store had postcard display stands out on the street. To ensure that the postcards would not be stolen, they had a state-of-the-art security apparatus: some kind of deal with an apparently homeless man who lounged near the store, watching would-be thieves. When I put my previously legally purchased postcards into my pocket, he thought I was shoplifting from the postcard displays. He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me inside the store, and I had no idea what was going on since neither he or the store owner spoke English. They somehow communicated that this had to do with postcards; I showed them my postcards, which were already covered with my handwriting; and they went, “oh.” After the mistake was revealed, I realized that my drink needed a bottle opener, and the apparently homeless man opened it for me. It was a little awkward. Anyway, yeah, Berlin. The Quebec flag flies right next to the Brandenburg Gate, which is neat. It has some cool museums (I desperately wanted to commit an actual forbidden act and take a picture of the bust of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum, against local rules). It has interesting history, especially around Nazi Germany and the Cold War. But otherwise it wasn’t that fun. I suppose it doesn’t help that it was a dreary gray January.
5. Washington
At the end of every school year, my secondary school in Quebec City organized a 4-day trip to some relatively nearby city for everyone in the year. In grade 7 we went to Ottawa and Montreal. In grade 8 we went to Boston. In grade 9 we went to Toronto. In grade 10 we went to New York. And in grade 11 we went to Washington, DC. All those trips have blurred into one mega-trip whose core memories mostly involve hanging out with friends in the bus or the interchangeable hotel rooms, but I’m pretty sure I saw the White House at some point. And some of the Smithsonian museums. It was fine, I guess. Nearly twenty years later, I live in Montreal, I’ve visited friends in Ottawa on a few occasions as we saw above, I’ve lived half a year in Boston, I’ve been to Toronto many times to visit my ex’s family, and I’ve spent a particularly memorable quarantine in a New York City hotel due to covid. But I never went back to Washington, DC. I’m due for a visit. Do I know anyone there?
Non-enumerated bonus! Strasbourg
The European Union likes to pretend it’s a country and get invited to meetings of countries, and as such it is a “non-enumerated member” of the G7. Everybody seems to just go along with it. I might as well join the parade and give it a non-enumerated rank in my list. Complicating matters, however, is that I haven’t really been to its de facto capital city. I did land at the Brussels Airport once, and from there bought a complicated train ticket to Groningen, in the Netherlands, that involved changing trains in Antwerpen, Roosendaal, Rotterdam, and Zwolle over the course of 5.5 hours. To this day it is questionable whether I can say I have visited Belgium. I certainly can’t say I’ve visited Brussels. Fortunately for my blog post concept, I have visited the EU’s fake capital, Strasbourg, where the European Parliament is located. The members of the European Parliament travel there several times a year for plenary sessions, a “traveling circus” that is widely considered a massive waste of resources, and everybody would like to consolidate all EU activities in Brussels, but France consistently vetoes any proposal to change the arrangement. I have no opinion on the matter, but Strasbourg is a pleasant place. Nice cathedral. Surprisingly tasty Alsatian food. Also, I was there two days after Berlin, and nobody mistook me for a thief.
4. Rome
I visited Rome in 2008, at 17, a few months before Washington, DC (see above). This was a fancier school trip, which obviously cost my parents more money and involved only one bus worth of students, including none of my friends. I shared my hotel rooms with two boys I didn’t know well. I remember them making mildly homophobic jokes. Italy was my first trip outside of North America, and also the first trip in which I had a digital camera and could take pictures that still live in my Photos app 17 years later. Combined, these two facts mean that I remember Rome more than I remember Washington, DC. But it’s still a bit hazy. It was forbidden to take pictures of the Sistine Chapel, so I don’t really remember seeing the Sistine Chapel. I do remember seeing St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Coliseum, and the ancient Roman Forum, and the Pantheon.2 Or do I? I was looking at the pictures in the Photos app, and I can’t say I have a lot of mental images that are distinct from those pictures, or more broadly from other media representations I’ve seen. Has my natural memory, 17 years later, completely been replaced by pixels? At least I remember the food, even if I took no pictures of it. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. During the whole Italy trip, all the hotels served us either Alfredo sauce pasta, or tomato sauce pasta. For lunch we often had pizza. It was incredibly repetitive. Wasn’t Italian cuisine supposed to be amazing? I guess the organizers of the trip at school were keeping things cheap for our parents. I do remember discovering the concept of blood orange juice and experiencing it as a revelation.
3. Paris
The Paris Syndrome is this phenomenon where Japanese people go to Paris and get depressed because it doesn’t meet their expectations. Reverse Paris Syndrome is when European people go to Japan and realize that everything there is better than they expected. We’ll come back to this in a minute when we discuss Tokyo, but for now I want to say that in Paris I experienced no syndrome at all. Paris matched my expectations perfectly. For example, I expected people to not understand my Quebec accent and therefore be rude to me because I use French words that they’re not used to, and sure enough, this exact thing happened. I will never forget the condescending gaze of this waiter at a bouchon restaurant after he asked me how I wanted to pay. Comptant, I said. He didn’t understand. No matter: I knew some synonyms. I tried them all. He still didn’t understand. In desperation I just took out the cash and handed it to him. « Ah! vous voulez dire en espèces! Il fallait le dire! » he said, evidently thinking I was a total idiot. To be sure, other than this, I expected Paris to be a great place, and it was. It’s just kinda wild that I experienced more culture shock there than in Tokyo.
2. London
If Paris matched my high expectations, London somehow beat them. What a magnificent, energetic, multilayered city. I went there last summer, finding it a bit absurd that a place that looms so large in history, culture, and increasingly my personal life, had managed to avoid being visited by me all this time. I spent five days meeting cool people and walking (and jaywalking) around the place. (I love how everybody there jaywalks, I didn’t expect that and it feels more human somehow.) It was exactly what I needed. On Twitter, where discourse about countries tends to converge on highly memetic clichés that usually bear only superficial relation to the actual countries, they say that the UK is a nation in decline. That may be so; but London certainly doesn’t demonstrate it. I suppose that someone like Jane Jacobs might say that the capital city being a dynamic and lively place, while the periphery suffers, is exactly what you’d expect from a nation in decline. Unlike all other countries being discussed in this post, I didn’t visit any other part of this one, so I can’t say. Maybe it’s actually bad. On the other hand, I do agree with the Twitter commentariat that the UK really needs to get its act together and install air conditioning everywhere. It’s frankly ridiculous to be afraid of suffering from a heat stroke while admiring the priceless artifacts of the British Museum in 2025. By some insane stroke of luck, my room near Russell Square was apparently the only place in the entire city to be equipped with AC. So I know they can do it. What are they waiting for?
1. Tokyo
I have to admit: I drafted this post before I had visited Tokyo, and had already kinda decided it would win (I had even already selected the cover image to represent that). Talk about an unfair contest. So when, last month, I finally arrived in the Japanese Eastern Capital, by some metrics the largest city in the world,3 I had to contend with the fact that Tokyo is rather ugly. In fact it’s probably the ugliest city on this list. Its architecture is modernist, and not the interesting kind. It doesn’t have that many iconic tourist sites (you want to go to Kyoto for that). It doesn’t have any trash cans, which is annoying. After a few of the five days I was spending there, I wanted to get out; after three days in Kyoto, I regretted planning fewer nights there than in Tokyo. So I wondered: should Tokyo be ranked second, after London, or even third, after Paris? I let some time pass, visited other Japanese cities, and then came back to Tokyo for one last night before my flight back to the Western Hemisphere. And then I decided that yes, Tokyo did deserve the #1 spot. It’s great in an unexpectedly normal way. None of it is spectacular, but everything works. I mentioned Reverse Paris Syndrome above — I didn’t quite have it because I did expect Tokyo (and Japan in general) to be good, but the phenomenon is real. Tokyo is easy and convenient, and it is full of delightful spots, shops, quiet streets, lively streets, shrines, large stores that unexpectedly have 9 floors, random tiny restaurants that you want to pick because there’s a lineup and once you have waited for an hour you eat the best Japanese beef dish you’ve ever had. It also doesn’t quite feel like a city that has more people than all other cities on this list combined, or as much as my entire country. It sprawls, I suppose, and it is also quite dense in some places, but it generally feels like a regular, well-scaled, walkable city. The only exception is the absurd elevated highway that they built right over the Nihonbashi bridge, a bridge so important that it has been the zero kilometer marker for all roads in Japan for 400 years. The bridge is now dwarfed and dominated by the highway, which feels vaguely cyberpunk. But it’s the only instance of that particular feeling, which I kind of expected from an Asian metropolis, that I’ve seen. The rest is normal. I could live there.
Did you know: Ottawa sometimes gets called “Silicon Valley North” because of its tech industry. Lol.
I suppose some of those are technically within the capital of a non-G7 country, the Vatican City-State, but I’m willing to let Rome have them.
Two days after I left Tokyo to visit other parts of Japan, it was demoted to 3rd largest, after Jakarta and Dhaka, apparently because of methodology updates rather than me leaving.
"Tokyo did deserve the #1 spot. It’s great in an unexpectedly normal way. None of it is spectacular, but everything works...I could live there." Preach!
I had the same shock when London became my favorite European city. And the same shock that Tokyo has terrible architecture! I spent two weeks there and then was very glad I spent a month in Kyoto afterward. Such a huge difference!