For each city I have a map. A piece of paper that eventually worn down the fiber and with repeated bending gradually erased the design of streets in the weeks and their disappearance became familiar to me. It is a small rectangle the size of a paperback open. It's never one of those huge map which, unfolded, isolate you, alerting you to the city that continues to advance.
- These cards then the cards accordions belong to long trips, open space on the horizon, roads continued for hours by car from villages and fields, checking the number of the county a quick glance at the card on the passenger seat. These cards belong to the landscape long marches, explorers, where the least important race, the curvature of roads and water points; there, they can spread the floor, look at it more, his knees hold the edges search paths. -
For cities, I love this little format that condenses the streets in a range of colors visible, without half-tone, without detail, and may consult walking in the crowd without slowing progress. These are practical plans found in receptions for tourists or in the pages of a detachable guide.
I love because I love both cards get lost, wandering aimlessly and without direction suddenly I locate, understand the distance traveled.
I remember the map of San Francisco stopped in the green heart sharp net united Golden Gate Park, while in contrast the blue of the bay hemming the edge. And it's the other side, where the map the streets and interrupted the performance, it is towards this gap, where the names would be to write yourself and the lines of streets to be extended, that I'm most often directed. I took the bus that went straight for half an hour, without changing street once to follow a line parallel to Ocean Beach, depositing me at the corner of Safeway parking lot, over-sized gray rectangle face the vast and deserted beach of the Pacific Ocean.
With each new city, I get this card, still the same size. City still in-sight, contained in a rectangle that I stand before me, arms extended in alignment with the shoulders. From what I discovered while walking, only the name streets and their approximate cross maps to the simplified map buried in my pocket. The walk turns these yellow lines Foreign everyday landscape in sequence of pictures and benchmarks intimate.
few days after my arrival in San Francisco, I chose a street he had to start somewhere, this might prove to other street. A straight line, as they all are, that was up the bay, a few centimeters on the map but nearly two hours along the 2000 issues of the endless street, which seemed neither approach the bay, or which disappeared from the horizon to measuring successive undulations.
Despite identical rectangle, each card to its own scale, not shown, is needed for its operation, self-discovery.
These cards are not a guide, they are a representation of where I love to plan until the actual crossing, revealed me away forever. I appropriate the city, the map becomes abstract, I lose, I look at her without seeing anything there, it becomes blurred, false, she disappears beneath his gaudy past now, it is nothing that a crumpled piece of paper reminding me that day this city was foreign to me.
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