My dad has always been the kind of person who will walk a street once and will never have to look at a map again. When we would travel as a family he would look at a map before we left a hotel and we’d reach our destination without him looking at one again. I always took that for granted when I was a kid and as I’ve traveled more and more I’ve learned to do the same thing; pay attention to the streets I’m walking and the landmarks I’m passing when I’m in a new place so that I can create my own map or my own directions in my head. I think it’s kind of a beautiful thing how the places that on your first day of a trip seem so unfmailiar are ingrained into your brain by the last day of a trip.
The other night I was reading a book and it got me thinking about this whole idea of observing and getting to know a city by simply just walking the streets. I haven’t read too much of this book yet, but in what I have covered so far the author talks about how she moved to London in her early twenties, before the advent of Google Maps, and a way that she got to know the city was by just walking around and creating her own map in her head. Unlike what we do now where we can simply plug a location into an app on our phone, she had to pay attention to the street names, the sites that stood out to her along the way, and the associations she made in each place that made them stand out to her and used that to help guide her around this unfamiliar place. I thought this was highly interesting as it’s not something that I’ve actively thought about before; I love wandering around and discoveirng a new place, but because I’ve always had the luxury of a phone with a maps app I’ve never really thought about the map of the city that I’ve created for myself in my head.
What do I mean by the map of the city I’ve created for myself? Well, think about how foreign it is when you step off a plane into a completely new location and you have no idea where you are. You could be paying attention to where you are at that current moment, but you don’t get have any idea of where you are in relation to anything else. As you come to explore that city and pay attention to what’s going on nearby you start to make those links and think to yourself, “oh, that metro station I got off at is right down the street from that coffee shop I went to on the first day and just East of that is the restaurant that we’re going to for dinner tomorrow.” Without thinking about it, everytime we’re in a new place, our brain is linking things together and doing it’s regular genius thing of creating an image or a map in our mind of how everywhere we’ve been fits together. Reading that excerpt of the book got me thinking about that for the first time and I decided to use it as a way to think about the way that I got to know DC when I first moved here.
Maybe I’ve written about it on this blog, but my first trip to DC on my own was after my freshmen year of college (because I spent the first year at home because of Covid) and I felt like everything was a blur during that trip; I had no idea what was where or where I was going. But it’s funny that now, three years on, I pass some of those “landmarks” that I came across on that first trip and it’s kind of a funny reminder of how disoriented I was in the beginning in this city.
DC is not a big city, nor is it that difficult to find your way around. In London you have a million little side streets and there’s seemingly no structured way to organize them, but in DC our streets are organized in a grid and they’re numbered in one direction and ordered alphabetically in the other – it’s pretty easy to stand at one spot in DC and follow the numbers and letters to get somewhere else. I remember finding it so crazy when I moved here that cities could actually be organized like this? However, for three years I hardly stepped beyond 30th street and stayed within the alphaebtical streets of M through P, just around Georgetown’s campus.
It’s funny because one of my favorite things to do when I visit a new city is to just walk around, not in a structured way with a list of landmarks that I want to see, but just to follow what seems interesting. I feel like I’ve really seen a city when I can walk around like a local without a map, just like my dad did on all of our trips growing up. But I guess that I never really expeirenced that in DC over the past few years that I lived here because I never took the time to simply wander and make the links between all of the places in the city that I had already been to. I stayed pretty isolated in Georgetown and when I would leave the neighborhood most of the time I’d be on the bus just looking at my phone or in an Uber doing the same thing; I didn’t give my brain a moment to tie those locations together and create a map. So something that’s been really fun since I’ve moved out of Georgetown and into a different part of DC has been putting together all of these broken links of places I’ve been to around DC. There’s the cake store that I went to once with my parents that is actually a block away from where I live now. The hotel that I stayed at on my first trip to DC that I walk past all the time now. The main street that I live on that I’ve crossed a dozen times on my way to get somewher else in DC. The Italian restauarant that I went to a with a friend and her dad that isn’t far from here. All of these personal landmarks, spots that I have memories in, around the city that once seemed so foreign that are now a part of the fabric of my everyday life. It’s like I’m creating my own map of the city and linking together different spots that I’ve visited over the year, and finally making those geographical connections that craft this map of what DC is to me.
It made me think about how in a way, and just like the author of this book was saying, we all sort of have our own map of our cities that we develop as we become more and more settled there, things that we keep building upon. Out on a Sunday morning stroll we know that we might walk past the place where we love going out with friends, a cafe where we might have had a first date, or a park where we might have had a mental breakdown. Thinking about drawing up the city in this way really made me think about how we truly live in these cities and how the relationship goes both ways; we get to know the city as we embrace every corner and build memories all acorss it, but that also the city is an important backdrop in the life that we live out here.
It’s almost like the city can take you back to a specific time and help you see how far you’ve come; one of those places in DC that does that for me is Dupont Circle. The first time I came to DC alone, I stayed in Dupont Circle and the neighborhood seemed so scary and unfamiliar to me at the time. A few months later when my family came to move me into my first dorm we would go to a Tatte in Dupont for matcha and breakfast every morning and I already felt like the neighborhood was even more familiar. Thinking back to my time at Georgetown, I would sometimes venture out there to go to the farmer’s market on Sundays. I learned to drive in the Dupont neighborhood, and I went so many birthday dinners and outings with friends there. And now, I live relatively close so sometimes I’ll just find myself going on an evening walk there to get some steps in if I haven’t left my apartment all day. Maybe I’m just overly sentimental but I think it’s a beautiful thing how you can think back to a specific place and really see yourself grow up there. It’s so cool to think about how that neighborhood seemed so foreign to me when I first got there and now it’s a key lankmark on my personal map of DC.
Do you think that you’ve created a personal map of your city yet?
As I’m exploring more and more of DC in my postgrad journey, I’m excited to see what new places will become landmarks in my personal map of DC.
See you next week,
