The thought occurred to me, as I was walking to the hotel in Seattle the other day, that I might have forgotten what it’s like to actually visit a city, as opposed to work in it.
This isn’t a new thought by any means; I had a similar feeling when I was in San Francisco earlier this summer, my first non-work-related, non-family-related trip in a decade or so, for one thing, and I’ve repeatedly thought as I head into a work trip what it would be like to go somewhere and not have to rush to a hotel and immediately to work. This Seattle situation felt different, however, simply because of how I’d ended up there.
Traditionally, when I’ve arrived in the city, I’ve jumped in a cab from the train station and gone straight to the hotel; this time around, there was such a line for cabs and such a traffic jam surrounding the area, I thought, fuck it, I’ll walk. It’s not that far. In retrospect, this was a bad idea because I didn’t realize (a) it was all uphill, (b) it was about 30 minutes walk, and (c) I really didn’t know the neighborhood as well as I believed. That last part ended up being a plus, however; it meant that I walked through neighborhoods I haven’t seen in Seattle in more than a decade, and remembered that, hey, I actually like this city a bunch.
The problem had become, I realized, that I go to Seattle at least a couple of times each year now, and it’s always for work and it’s always staying in the same hotel in the same area as the convention center, so Seattle had shrunk down to a five block radius and a car ride to and from the train station. It was as if the rest of the city didn’t even exist, with the exception of the pizza place I always make a point of hitting up when I’m there — I love their potato pizza, what can I say? — and the Work Seattle that I’d created was… well, somewhere that was just filled with work and the related stress. I’d started to dislike Seattle because I couldn’t relax there.
The same is true of New York, where I go every October just for New York Comic Con — a city as amazing as New York shrinking to the area between the hotel and the convention center — and San Diego, too, although in my defense, I’ve always thought that San Diego was a pretty shitty city.
The year I spent a bunch of time in the UK between conventions, I gave myself a day to explore London for the first time in close to 20 years without any agenda or destination. It was a lovely day, and one that reminded me why I really do like that place after all. Maybe I need to start adding buffers to go explore aimlessly into every work trip, before my world gets so small I forget that I like it, deep down and after all.
