View from a moving car. Full moon low over LA, 2004.
Happy Friday the thirteenth, dear comrades, and welcome to the Open Mic! If you’re new here, on Fridays we get together here for some chat. (Sometimes there’s a guest artist instead.) The topic varies from week to week, but everyone is welcome to participate in the comments.
Today I’m thinking of yesterday’s post with San Francisco by night, and of my upcoming travels. Tell me about a city in your life. One you’ve lived in forever, or one you left long ago. One you’ve always longed to visit, or one you remember with bitterness as the setting of the worst period of your life.
More urban inspiration from the blog: my words, Naveed’s photos.
I’ll catch you in the comments.
I don’t remember Montreal with bitterness though it is the setting of a basically true and very unsettling story that I have to finish. If I’d been there without a certain person, I would only remember learning more and more French each day without trying, some beautiful streets that looked like pictures I’d seen of old Europe, surprisingly friendly people, and the first time I’d seen a mountain in the center of a city. There were so many places to go nearby and quaint, relaxing things to do, that I still want to go back. I want to go back with my real family. It’s a memory I should have made with them in the first place.
Ré, everyone has been telling us we have to visit Montreal while we’re in Toronto, but it was your “mountain in the center of a city” that made me really want to go. We will try to do it if we can. 🙂 (BTW — we are staying with my mom’s old friend, and her husband is Danish. Even he said Montreal looks like Europe.)
I hope you’ll get the chance to go back someday. 🙂 You describe the city so beautifully.
I have spent pretty much all my life in London, UK, and really would like to try living somewhere else some time. But truly the big city is a hard fix to beat and London has so much. I spent a few months in Barcelona when I was at college – to train in visual theatre – and though I relished the chance to be away, be somewhere more relaxed (in some ways), close to the sea and the mountains, with delicious, cheaper food… beautiful art and funky people… by the end of 3 months I both hadn’t had a chance to settle, and knew it missed for me some of the vitality of London which is maybe oxygen to me. It’s London’s ethnic diversity, and access to culture which I take for granted and probably need more time away from to fully appreciate. Yes it’s smelly and dense, but there is Hampstead Heath – London’s lung – and other splendid parks. I can’t be far from green, and could do with spending a bit more time in nature.
London has so many memories imprinted on it for me, I love that some of the same areas like Islington and Hackney have layers upon layers of my life ingrained so that none may sting me, but plenty of my own sly smiles surprise me! It feels like my home through and through, and as I cycle through traffic and rush hour or down empty roads in the quiet hours, I am grateful for it, commune with it, and dance with it’s noise and shapes.
Ahhh, it’s wonderful to read your take on London. I’ve only heard about it from visitors, never a native. 🙂 I love what you’ve said about certain places holding layers and layers of memory for you. I love that.