Places zentropy Wants to Go

Anonymously sculpted and donated, these sculptures made from poetry books and pages are sprinkled around the city.

A verdant 17th-century-style garden hidden along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.

This allegedly haunted 16th-century tower house-turned-museum exhibits thousands of spectacular objects.

A book bound in the skin of an infamous criminal, along with countless other specimens.

Near the former site of numerous witch burnings, this lavish Edinburgh mainstay pays homage to Scotland's brutal history.

This series of Scottish caves has no clear purpose other than baffling historians.

One of the oldest scientific gardens in Britain, containing more than 13,302 plant species in its core collection.

This ornate Victorian marketplace was the setting for Diagon Alley and the Leaky Cauldron in the first ‘Harry Potter’ film.

One of the few remaining casualties of the London Blitz, this destroyed church has become an enchanting public garden.

Featuring a meatless buffet fit for kings, this family-owned Zurich eatery is considered the oldest vegetarian restaurant in the West.

The sole surviving relic of the San Francisco neighborhood cobbled together from old horsecars and streetcars.

The first AIDS memorial chapel in San Francisco and one of only a few in the U.S.

A tiny theater hidden in an alley plays a constant stream of short silent films for anyone willing to peer through the peephole.

Bring your own cardboard to the slippery slopes of concrete hidden in a neighborhood park.

This surreptitious shop is only open five hours per week.

A collection of memorabilia from the Beat era in the back of a San Francisco bookstore.

Staircase winds down the side of Telegraph Hill through gardens, wild parrots flying overhead.

An abandoned car and strange wooden debris are among the scattered remains of the old sand and gravel quarry.

A hardware store Buddha statue installed to deter vandalism wound up attracting Vietnamese immigrants who came to pray.

A gap in the concrete has been transformed into a miniature playground for the mind.

A restored 1920s cascade stairway provides one of the best views of Oakland's Lake Merritt.

A temple devoted to inner esoteric mysteries located in a California commercial strip.

One of the best absinthe distilleries in the United States.

The newsstand that never closes its doors—well, almost never.