The experience of travelling is closely related to our dreams, our readings, the descriptions we have heard from friends and acquaintances. Samarkand, Isfahan, Marrakech, Damascus, Jaiselmer, are names that are meaningful to us. I would say, they have some magics in themselves.
The impact of each name on people, depends on one's own experience, how one has got familiar with it: let's say, it might have been a movie, a book, a friend from that city...
In my personal case, that happens with the 'Silk Road'. The two words are like a knob that opens the door of my imagination to an alluring world in which one breaths a mysterious glamour. Whoever has travelled through the Central Asia routes, either in our century or much much earlier, always reports with enthusiasm how the local lifestyles and building environments are fascinating and exotic at their eyes.
