I used to think that I was pretty damn amazing with my skills at direction and orientation. I always knew precisely where I was and the absolute best way to get to where I was going. Of course, this was because I lived in South Minneapolis, an Eden of grid-pattered, consecutively numbered streets where the university gave out masters degrees in navigation if you could pass the following test:
1) Simon says raise your right hand
2) Simon says raise your left hand.
3) Quick! Raise your right hand again!
You needed at least 66.61% to pass. Needless to say, most people get it in less than three tries. And yet, even with this abundance of exquisitely oriented people, there’s never a taxi around when you really need it. Strange place.
Anyhoo, I’ve been ensconced at the other end of the spectrum for the past five days, trying not to get effed-up lost in London and Venice.
Let’s start with London. London’s streets were surveyed based on the wanderings of a drunken ox. Swear to god. There isn’t a single straight street in the entire bloody city nor do any of them follow any kind of naming model so if you’re on Lion Avenue and you wanna get to Nutmeg Lane, you have no way of knowing if you’re two blocks away or 10 miles away. Or which direction. Or what jackhole decided to name the lane “Nutmeg”, cause we pants people for less than that in South Minneapolis.
Then there’s all the naming extensions: Street, Road, Lane, Mews, Rise, Walk, Way, Alley, Hill, Friars, Place, Drive, Row and who knows what else. More often than not, they reuse names, giving different extensions. There could be a Jackhole Road, Jackhole Avenue, Jackhole Way, Jackhole Alley, Jackhole Drive and Jackhole Lane. And just to fuck with us, they usually make two or more of those Jackholes intersect and maybe have them run parallel for a bit then split off again at which stage you don’t know remember which one it was that you were supposed to be following.
And it’s not just me the idiot tourist who can’t find his way. Taxi drivers have to take two years of classes to get themselves suitably oriented to London’s streets before they’re even allowed to touch a steering wheel. And even after all of that, they’ve got some of the most thumbed through A to Zs in the city.
Furthermore, London’s streets don’t always follow a little something the rest of the universe calls the Space Time Continuum. Take last Tuesday. I was walking down a street trying to find a shoe store when the street forked. There were no signs indicating the names of either of these streets (natch), so I just chose the left fork and kept going. At the next corner the city of London was kind enough to put up a street sign which alerted me to the fact that I’d chosen the wrong fork. Fine. I’d just turn the corner and cut over to the other fork. Seems like something that might plausibly happen in our beloved Space Time Continuum, no? Not so fast! I cut over to where the other street should have been, it looked odd, so I consulted a map posted at a bus stop only to find I had traveled approximately three miles (give or take three miles) from the fork point and wasn’t anywhere near the streets I had been on just moments earlier. Furthermore, it was 1972. I bet that was exactly how Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin came up with “Time Bandits”.
So that’s London. Venice is a whole other story.
To call Venice’s streets a maze is a gross understatement. I noted this during my previous trip three years ago. Encapsulating the state of Venice’s streets was so far beyond any words currently available in the English language that I was forced to start a now well-worn habit of inventing a new word in order to express myself completely. That word was “Extreme-giga-maze-hard-core-to-the-max-Gomer”. It still hasn’t caught on like I imagined it would, but working new words into the popular lexicon is more difficult than opening a bottle of wine with another bottle of wine (that was a sucky night).
If you haven’t had the pleasure, Venice’s streets are little more than jagged corridors, occupied by tens of thousands of the least prepared and staying-out-of-my-way-challenged tourists in the world. The streets are so tiny and there’s so damn many of them that even the most detailed map becomes a useless blur of disarray after you move away from Saint Mark’s Square or the Rialto Bridge. The upshot is that in the three years since my last visit, Venice has made astonishing progress in marking its streets. They’ve painted large and easily discernable signs for every little alley, tunnel and crevasse. Still, you’re never 100% sure whether or not you’re on the right track until your feet get wet or you’re being pooped on by a Saint Mark’s pigeon.
That’s pretty much all I have to say this week. I know some of you were waiting for some juicy LP gossip from the London workshop last week, but there’s really nothing to tell. We had a great time, I learned a lot and my pants stayed around my waist in all public areas.
Besides, I’m a bit preoccupied with two magazine assignments, fighting off a cold and figuring out if it’s humanly possible to update two LP books for Tuscany in the time that’s been allotted to me. Good times.
I love your Space Time Continuum theory! I’ve had exactly the same experience in both London and Venice and spent many hours wandering hopelessly lost in the maze. Being hopelessly lost in the maze is not always a bad thing…sometimes you stumble upon amazing finds that you would never have discovered had you not been lost. However, when you are actually trying to get to a specific place at a specific time, it’s maddening.
If it’s any consolation, you make being hopelessly lost very amusing.
London can be like that. I rarely had a clue where I was, how far I had walked, how far it was from one point to another, and whether it was night or day. Utterly clueless.
Plus, the British don’t give good directions. They always miss the critical step. “Oh, at the end of this street, I was supposed to hang a left and THEN a right! Thanks for leaving out that last direction, Nigel.” Every time! EVERY TIME!
And yet, the moment I set foot in Paris, I knew exactly where I was at all times. Go figure.
I’m bemused that anyone can be lost in any city with only two roughly horizontal dimensions and named coordinates of any kind.
In Tokyo, oh Tokyo, the drunk surveying ox rode an acid-powered rocketship.
You should driving there. I come from Adelaide, South Australia which is a city designed from scratch and enjoys the same grid like street pattern. If you miss a street, no matter, you just take the next one and go around the block. All the roads are dual carriage way and rush hour last 5 minutes.
Some how I ended up driving for a living in London. Where if you miss your turn you can’t take the next one because it is a one way street, or if it isn’t takes you in the wrong direction anyway. You can’t take the one after that because it was designed before 3.5t trucks were invented and you don’t fit. Rush hour is a random event that is yet to be fully understood. If a lane is closed on the A4 in Chiswick traffic is backed up to Hyde Park corner. Main roads are single lanes with inches to spare. It can take 2 hours to travel 2 miles. Streets change names (Not that there posted anyway) 4 times in 100 meters and then change back to the original name. Every street looks exactly like the last so you feel like your going around in circles even if your not.
Just be happy your walking.
ja
Pretty much concur with the previous comments from SaucyM, Harold, Katie & Scott but, truth be told, hasty snapshots were so anticipated that I really didn’t care you were lost in London, tho’ did enjoy your “ohhh, why use a tourist map words”. It did make me think, “fun-times when our fearless leader hits Tuscany” but a couple of power boat canal trips should have lifted your heart & spirit……well, no matter, this fan is still anxiously waiting for those yet-to-be written words on your “Travels in Tuscany”.
Hey Guys,
I’m in Florence now. I haven’t been lost once, even for a second. It’s like heaven.
But on Saturday i start driving. I’ve never paid attention before… Does Italy have good road signs? Man, I don’t have any idea which direction to go just to get out of Florence. Maybe there’ll be a map in the glove compartment.
I got totally lost in NYC last weekend on a layover from Romania.
I was trying to find the Empire State Building but it’s so big it seems a lot nearer than it is. I kept thinking it was one more block away but it never was and nobody in NYC seemed to know what street it was on which seemed weird.
“Or what jackhole decided to name the lane “Nutmeg”, cause we pants people for less than that in South Minneapolis.”
Best line in a while. But then, I failed the U’s navigation test.
Well, picturing you leaving Florence via a hired-car, glovebox map was my hard laugh for today. Driving in Italy isn’t too bad providing you have a decent, current map that shows both the Toll and secondary roads (which you’ll use a lot) and which roads are not paved. Many in the Tuscan hills are hard dirt…great in summer but a tad ugly during a rainstorm. Not so different from parts of Romania. As to how to get out of Florence, why not ask the locals for directions…heh, heh.
Friends and I rented scooters in Florence to head out to the countryside and find wine (drinking and scooters… probably a bad idea) I tried following them out of town and got lost between the 9th and 10th roundabout and never saw them again. Stuck with a ride up the river instead.
As always, I am laughing out loud at your vivid and comical commentary and observations. Plus, I enjoy the liberal sprinkling of “Jackhole” throughout – quite a universally appropriate word.