Looking at a map

The map does not show the rain:
only pale blue for sea...

- Looking at a Map, Dannie Abse (extract)

Being in a new place, should you see all of the things on a map or in a guidebook?

A map becomes 3d and builds itself in your mind as you explore the place. Some parts will remain flat, with little drawings of buildings and places of interest. Others are alive with smells and sounds and your memories and photographs, fighting for space on the paper.

I always feel a trip to somewhere new has been a success; worthwhile; memorable; to be told of; if I discover a place that suits it's surroundings for me, or makes me think, whether that simply be the atmosphere of the city or town, or epitomises the essence of the trip. Or something that's surprising...

I love reading guidebooks. I love finding out what someone else deemed to be worth putting in those few pages. Why is somewhere better to see than another?

No one will have the same experience as you, anywhere.

Why does something or somewhere stand out particularly, years later?

A woman dressed in rags on her knees but with a perfect posture, head down, palms up to the sky and to the hundreds of well dressed passers by, on a back street near the Rialto bridge in Venice in December. This sticks in my mind more than the hundreds of similar sights I saw in South East Asia.

________________________

Walking, wandering, photographing along residential streets and canals on a sunny early evening in Amsterdam, five of us stumbled across Cafe Nagel.

An Art Deco, one-room corner bar, it looked intriguing. We spent an hour or so in there, drinking local beer and enjoying the fact that it felt like our discovery of the weekend. Full of people who appeared to be meeting after work, none of whom took any notice of us - we were neither welcome or unwelcome - invisible observers.

Smoky, but only for the next 8 days until the smoking ban would kick in, the sun was at the perfect point in the sky where it shone in sheets through the windows and stained glass panels; the walls covered in illustrations, photos and prints in mismatched, mis-sized frames, all of which implied a strong story behind them. Who knows. That's what we wanted to believe anyway.

We went back the next day about 2pm.

It wasn't open.

Maybe there are some places you shouldn't return to.....