My favourite cheese place anywhere is the cheese market in Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. It stretches for several blocks, cheese as far as you can see (interrupted only by the occasional fresh bread stall - their local polenta bread is wonderful stuff). Turkey probably makes more varieties of cheese even than France. I've never seen anything like their string cheese anywhere else.

The grimmest cheese experience I've had has to be the annual agricultural fair in Hamilton, New Zealand. They had competitions for butter and cheese. There were vast tables with dozens of cheddar cheeses and blocks of butter on them (about fifty pounds each), each table having three blocks with first, second and third prize rosettes stuck on them. After sampling several tons of each, how the heck could they tell?