A Sense of Place

When I first moved to Boston I used to walk around looking for clues that I was actually in Boston and nowhere else. This move came after a confused run of moving around, then a good while in the middle of nowhere in Ohio. I would walk down the street and read the manhole covers and police cars. When I woke up in the morning during the first year (when things were not going all that well) I'd be absolutely convinced I was in my bedroom back in Ohio and I'd open my eyes to yellow walls and curtains and morning sunshine. Then I'd wake up and see my drab little Boston room, and go read the manhole covers once I headed out for the day.

In London you don't need visual clues which literally spell out where you are. This was what we saw out of our window the first night in London:



I guess in the US you might need to read manhole covers to figure out where you are sometimes, but when you travel to places with more history and more engrained historical identity you don't. There was little doubt we were in London no matter where we went. Now, for research purposes, I'll have to go to Paris and see if and how you can tell one European city from another.

This is what we saw out of our window in Yorkshire:



Aside from the quaint village buildings, you could tell you were in Yorkshire by the pervasive greenness, the lumpy moors visible from the edge of town, the way people would call you "love" even if you never met them before, and the smell of coal fires and manure (depending on which way the wind was blowing, and how cold it was). When the sky was overcast, the gray clouds seemed different from the way the clouds blow off the ocean and hit the continent here... more leisurely, less solid, more lumpy. The mist that often hung between the hills was different, too. The rain was finer. When it was sunny, though, it had the same nuclear intensity as the sun has here.

As I was riding to work this morning I was looking for clues that I was in Cambridge and not Boston... the only one that struck me was that every third car was a Prius. But I don't ride in Boston traffic enough to know if that's a difference.