We are a new community, exploring a different angle to seeing the world via other people's eyes. We want you to be an integral part of it in showing us your hometown or home region. Tell us anything and everything you love (or something you don't love, that's ok too), you remember, you want us to know about your city.

This is an open invitation to all of you. Constructing lengthy articles, make a witty quip or just post a photo, which you want to share with us and which embodies a special part of your home.

In previous times you had to travel the world, to get to know various cultures and nations, to learn from its peoples about their civilizations. It certainly has not lost its appeal, to be a world traveler and even if the focus has shifted from the era of educational travels of the late 1700s and early 1800s, with such prominent protagonists as the young Sturm und Drang author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, we still love traveling to broaden our perspectives and fill our hearts and minds with invaluable memories.

Not only the matured Goethe in his classical phase could appreciate the warmth and comfort of home, but the pandemic as well has taught us, how precious it is, to have a place, where you're always welcome; a place, you know inside and out; where you played on a lake in the park with your friends or where you remember your first kiss on a bench under a special tree, which your initials are still carved in.

This roughly translated quote is attributed to Goethe, and he is right. The good doesn't always lie in the distance, in faraway lands, but at home.

And where you can show and teach the world about this special place, in which you live(d); sometimes your whole life, sometimes a few years. But you are no visitor to this place. You have made it your home.

Everything a tourist sees, is a fleeting memory, briefly captured in a photographic memento. The tourist who snapped an admirable picture from the Eiffel tower lets the world know, he was there, but he knows nothing about Paris other than what's in his tour guide. And soon after he took the photo, he's already gone and has forgotten about the place, he visited.

Can you imagine, what the Bouquinistes could tell him about the 7th district of Paris, about the Île-de-France or about making ends meet as a waiter in one of the most expensive cities in the world? Visitors are important, but they are nothing without the inhabitants of the visited location.

The "Introduce Your City" community wants all those perspecitves. We want the good, the bad and the ugly. We want memories and stories, we want contest-contributions, as soon as our contests are up and running.

Above anything else, we want to connect Hivers all over the world and we want to learn from you, from your experiences, your stories, your cultures and hometowns.