Places Vivian Shen Wants to Go

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

Every color in the rainbow awaits.

If Hello Kitty were Mickey Mouse, this would be Disneyland.

Tokyo’s only Vaudeville-cuckoo clock–steampunk-Victorian curio cabinet time piece.

A taste of the macabre Tokyo's ritzy shopping district.

A trail weaves through the verses of a poem illustrated by stone sculptures inspired by Native American pictographs.

This semi-hidden Manhattan restaurant is based out of a loading dock.

Neon signs that grace the windows of Bergdorf Goodman's and Tiffany & Co. come from this studio in Brooklyn.

Abandoned power station once home to a squatter community, now being developed into an arts center.

During the holidays, a vintage subway train whisks New Yorkers back in time.

The beautiful tunnel that ran from the lobby to Penn Station is still hidden underneath 34th Street.

This former Norwegian sailor's church is slowly being taken over by ramshackle robot musicians.

Nondescript elevator doors open to reveal a stunning, surreal world.

A restaurant on Staten Island showcases a different grandmother’s cooking every night.

A room in New York City that contains 250 cubic yards of dirt.

Become a prohibition rebel.

Hidden in Central Park's Ramble is a troublesome cave buried just beneath the surface.

Dodge prohibitionists and slide through the telephone booth in Crif Dogs.

This theme park presents 5,000 years of Shanghai history and includes a "sunken" exhibition hall.

An collection of Chinese propaganda posters from 1949 to 1979.

Rivers of cattle blood gone, a strange Escheresque building remains, the last of its kind.

This psychedelic tourist trap is a leisurely descent into madness.

A collection of objects supposedly singed by the hands of souls in purgatory.

At the crypt of St. Mary of Eulogies and the Dead you are left alone to ponder mortality among piles of skulls.