I am not a collector of touristy baubles, but I am a collector of maps. Whenever I travel somewhere I always pick up a tourist map for navigational purposes, but I always end up keeping them because I’m borderline obsessive about maps, and I find tourist maps in particular to be really interesting. There are always little visuals for tourist landmarks and sometimes different areas of the city are color-blocked, and it’s just fascinating to see how different the layout of each city is and, as a result, how stylistically different each map is. Since coming to Europe, I’ve become increasingly enchanted by metro maps; they’re such amazingly intricate systems, and I love how the map’s interwoven tendrils of color visually convey that. As I said before, BORDERLINE OBSESSIVE. Nevertheless, here are a few maps from my collection.
1 & 2: Paris. 3 & 4: Barcelona. 5 & 6: Rome. 7 & 8: London Tube. 9 & 10: 360° view from top of London Eye. 11: Berlin. 12: Berlin S-Bahn and U-Bahn.
kendallgoodwin.wordpress.com 
i LOVE looking at maps. I had a thing for reading my parent’s Atlas when I was a kid…and even now, as an adult, I have maps lining my hallway. I really like the photo with the circular map, how neat!
Reblogged this on Colby is Mega and commented:
I love maps of…. well everything!
I too love maps… maps of anything. You have a nice collection. I also like your phrasing, “map’s interwoven tendrils of color.”
Here is a cool blog you might like: http://bigthink.com/blogs/strange-maps
Hmm.. that might look like spam, but it’s not. I found that site a while ago and it has weird and unusual maps of all kinds.
(I am also fond of the design of paper money and flags of all kinds.)
I have the same map of Paris! 🙂
Lisbon’s subway net is very small compared to those, but the city maps can be beautiful. I’ll make sure you’ll add one to your collection soon! 🙂