Places Blake Olmstead Wants to Go

A colossal sculptural lion built by the same man who designed the Statue of Liberty.

A majestic lion statue guards this Parisian botanical garden, and feeds on an unsettling item.

Replicas of Apollo's leonine stone guard cats still line a sacred row in Greece.

The largest tiger reserve in India is a vast expanse dotted with ancient ruins of Nagarjuna Viswa Vidyalayam.

On Japan's Tashirojima Island, cats are king.

This collection of Japanese luck idols beckons visitors with over 2,000 waving paws.

Once a prosperous mining village, this tiny Taiwanese town is now overrun with cute cats.

Make your reservation to have coffee with some kitties.

This tiny, painted door at the base of a tree stump has been a fixture of the Harvard University campus for decades.

Gilded heaven for philatelists and architecture freaks, still in full working order despite sitting atop tremulous ground.

Mirrors and glass shards cover every inch of this arrestingly beautiful mosque.

An uber-secure, windowless tower of doom in the center of Manhattan is an NSA spyscraper.

In its continuing quest to recreate famous parts of the world in miniature, China now has its own ghost Paris.

A psychedelic labyrinth on the San Francisco bay.

Built by prisoners of war, the largest small-scale model ever built includes eight miles of tiny streams that now sit abandoned.

This lake in the Cascades lives up to its name, disappearing down a hole every spring.

The legendary birthplace of the Japanese maneki-neko is dotted with hundreds of lucky beckoning cats.

Tucked away amidst some of the most famous addresses in the world is New York’s only fraction of a street.

Home of Philip Johnson, one of the 20th century's most influential architects.

Mutant vegetables, transgenic mosquitos, and atomic rodents span the walls of this one-of-a-kind museum.

Impossibly life-like natural history models created out of glass by a father and son.

This peaceful Massachusetts graveyard was one of the first "garden-style" cemeteries in America.

The thousands of shades on display — some toxic, others impossibly rare — are a library of more than just color.

Two thousand artifacts from around the world collected by one woman who loved to travel.