Carmelita detail
Day 13
Neighborhoods Covered: Lower Haight, Hayes Valley
Streets Completed: Haight, Lloyd, Carmelita, Potomac, Germania
Before I left the house yesterday to finish Haight and a few peripheral streets, I considered taking a map with me. I specifically had in mind the Realtor's map I've been using to track my progress, which is one of your standard all-encompassing, fold-out, If I'm Looking at this, I Am Probably a Tourist map.
And for that reason, I opted to go map-less.
Even when I am a tourist, I hate looking like one. In other cities, even foreign ones, it takes getting severely lost for me to be willing to consult a map; I'd much rather get myself slightly lost and then rely on my sense of direction (usually, though not always, quite good) to get myself un-lost again. Plus, I dislike giving off the sense that I am not of a place, even if that would be wildly obvious were I to, say, open my mouth and not be able to choke out more than a few words of the local language.
Here in my own city, I'm especially loath to give off a tourist vibe, especially since a big part of the motivation for this walking project is to see all of the stuff visitors to the city (and, for that matter, most city residents) never see. I also don't want to put myself in the path of anyone who might seek out tourists as easy prey for harassment. So despite the fact that I might stop every other block to take photos and jot notes, I've been walking map-less.
Which, I must say, is sort of dumb. Being out sans map yesterday meant that I missed finishing a few streets that were broken up by a block because I didn't know they continued beyond what I could see. It also meant that I did some hackneyed backtracking at certain points to land myself where I wanted to be. Not exactly tragic, either of those, but just annoying enough to make me rue my occasionally-more-stubborn-than-is-truly-necessary nature.
Because, really, on the residential side streets of the Lower Haight in the middle of a blazingly sunny afternoon, there was little chance anyone would take me for a tourist, or care if I were, or bother to interact with me in any case. So having a map wouldn't have been a bad thing.
My compromise, then, will be to keep my petite NFT with me in my walking bag so I can at least consider planning where I'm going rather than just letting myself gambol.
Neighborhoods Covered: Lower Haight, Hayes Valley
Streets Completed: Haight, Lloyd, Carmelita, Potomac, Germania
Before I left the house yesterday to finish Haight and a few peripheral streets, I considered taking a map with me. I specifically had in mind the Realtor's map I've been using to track my progress, which is one of your standard all-encompassing, fold-out, If I'm Looking at this, I Am Probably a Tourist map.
And for that reason, I opted to go map-less.
Even when I am a tourist, I hate looking like one. In other cities, even foreign ones, it takes getting severely lost for me to be willing to consult a map; I'd much rather get myself slightly lost and then rely on my sense of direction (usually, though not always, quite good) to get myself un-lost again. Plus, I dislike giving off the sense that I am not of a place, even if that would be wildly obvious were I to, say, open my mouth and not be able to choke out more than a few words of the local language.
Here in my own city, I'm especially loath to give off a tourist vibe, especially since a big part of the motivation for this walking project is to see all of the stuff visitors to the city (and, for that matter, most city residents) never see. I also don't want to put myself in the path of anyone who might seek out tourists as easy prey for harassment. So despite the fact that I might stop every other block to take photos and jot notes, I've been walking map-less.
Which, I must say, is sort of dumb. Being out sans map yesterday meant that I missed finishing a few streets that were broken up by a block because I didn't know they continued beyond what I could see. It also meant that I did some hackneyed backtracking at certain points to land myself where I wanted to be. Not exactly tragic, either of those, but just annoying enough to make me rue my occasionally-more-stubborn-than-is-truly-necessary nature.
Because, really, on the residential side streets of the Lower Haight in the middle of a blazingly sunny afternoon, there was little chance anyone would take me for a tourist, or care if I were, or bother to interact with me in any case. So having a map wouldn't have been a bad thing.
My compromise, then, will be to keep my petite NFT with me in my walking bag so I can at least consider planning where I'm going rather than just letting myself gambol.
1 comment:
i propose new legislation that allows everyone on earth to carry a NFT with them at all times. i don't think i would have made it here for years 1 and much of 2 without...
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