learning a city.

“I have loved making my way, imperfectly, around a foreign city on my own.  I have loved walking endlessly and getting lost and arriving at the museum or restaurant or store I wanted to go to just as it was closing. 

Missing the point of my excursion has forced me, on so many occasions, to find the secondary smaller points: the old woman sweeping out her front yard and putting water out for the cats, the baker cleaning out his ovens for the afternoon, the two kids refilling their shoe shine boxes with polish and clean rags—all of these small moments found only by wandering down a side street behind whichever museum I have failed to get to during its operating hour, or on the one day of the year it is closed for some local holiday I’ve never heard of. 

I have loved the feeling of being pummeled by the intricacies of a city.  And also loved the feeling of conquering, in small ways, a big city by myself, not speaking the language but eventually finding the right place to get coffee the way I want it, a good dinner, the train station, the bookstore. 

I have fallen apart on many train station platforms in many foreign cities, alone and unable to figure out why the scheduled train isn’t running.  And I have been helped, finally, by some person who can see what a sh– I am in and who has a handful of English words to offer.  I have made “friends” with a man at the kiosk who sells the International Herald Tribune and the street maps in his neighborhood, his city.

I have even loved, on a certain level, being the tongue-tied patron in the restaurant who so badly wants to eat what the natives all around me are eating over on their tables, but being too afraid or unwilling to ask.  I have loved being the woman who studies the menu so hard and tries to decode the language digging deep for her four years of advanced Latin, hoping this is a romance language and that that tedious academic effort will pay off as the mother of all languages must have children I recognize, and that will help me discern, linguistically, at least, fish from hamburger.  I have loved learning a city the hard way.”

– Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef  (paragraph breaks for the blog, mine)