Leave the map in your bag for the first hour

The moment I arrive somewhere new, I have learnt to do the least sensible thing available, which is to walk out of the station in whatever direction the crowd is not going, and leave the map where it is. This is not a system. It is closer to a superstition. But I hold it firmly, because the first hour in a place you have never been is the only hour you will ever spend seeing it as it actually is, and every year the pressure to waste that hour grows a little stronger. You come up the steps, the phone is already in your hand, the little blue dot is pulsing, and within thirty seconds you have converted a strange and unrepeatable city into a set of directions. You are no longer anywhere. You are simply between two points, following a line, and the place has become the dull grey space the line happens to pass through. I understand the appeal completely. Being lost is uncomfortable, and the map removes the discomfort instantly. But it removes the thing you came for along with it. When you do not know which way the centre lies, you look at everything, because everything might be a clue. You read the shop signs properly. You notice which cafe the taxi drivers use, which is always the good one, and you notice it precisely because you are hunting for a reason to trust one street over another. You overhear the first conversation, you smell whatever the first kitchen is cooking, you feel the actual slope of the hill in your legs rather than seeing it flattened on a screen. The place introduces itself, once, and only once, and it does so most generously to the person who has admitted they do not yet understand it. I have missed more connecting trains than I can count, and I regret almost none of them, because the connection is only the efficient version of the journey, and efficiency and travel have very little to do with one another. The train that leaves without you hands you a station you would otherwise have run straight through. So here is the whole of my argument, and it fits on the back of a ticket. You will spend the rest of your visit knowing where things are. You will have the map, the route, the confident stride of someone who belongs. You will get all of that soon enough, and it will be useful, and it will be a little duller each day as the mystery drains out of the streets. But you only get one first hour. Spend it lost on purpose. Turn the wrong way. Let the place be bigger than you for sixty minutes. The blue dot will still be there when you give in, and you will give in, and that is perfectly fine. Just make it wait.