HOW TO TAKE A WALK IN A
foreign country BY MARGARET HUIBREGTSE
Bring a rain jacket. And good shoes. These might sound obvious, but trust me on this. And this might seem almost insulting in the age of smartphones, but make sure you have a camera. Just in case. The camera isn’t to take pictures of any famous landmarks or postcard skylines, either. You can if you want to, but that’s not why you need it. You need the camera to take photos of the little, funny things that make a place real – the incongruous graffiti, the weird ads. And also, of the details that make the people real – the hand-lettered lawn signs, the spectacular (or spectacularly weird) gardens. And there might be a cool building or picturesque landscape in there, too. Mostly, though, we aren’t looking for photos. This walk isn’t a search for the spectacular. It’s an exercise in the mundane. It’s easy, when travelling, to skate over a place, to visit the museums and the landmarks, the cute little shops and the Anglicized restaurants and feel like you’ve “seen” the city, “know” the place. You don’t. All you’ve really demonstrated is how quick we as tourists are to forget that our exotic travel destination is omeone else’s home. The people who tour you around the landmarks and sell you things in the cute little shops go home at the end of the day, or maybe they
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SOUVENIRS
go out for a drink, or they take a run or go bowling or any of a million other things. The point of the walk is to remove the blinding patina of tourism, to find fresh eyes to look at this new place as a place, a rich hub of humanity instead of a dot on the map.
THE POINT OF THE WALK IS TO REMOVE THE BLINDING PATINA OF TOURISM. So bring a rain jacket. This might take a while. John Steinbeck once wrote about the Spanish verb vacilar, which he said meant something akin to “wandering,” but also slightly different. To be vacilado is to be looking for something without actually caring if you find it or not. I don’t speak Spanish, and the translations I found online don’t bear this definition out, so Steinbeck may have been completely making this up. I still find it useful, though, because vacilado is exactly the state of mind to be in when taking a walk – it’s good to have a goal,
