Forgive me for wandering down memory lane today, but Dave Snowden penned (keyed?) an interesting thought from Australia yesterday about why he never uses taxis while traveling, and it jarred a few memories loose (sound of glass breaking).

“On the other hand if you use public transport you have a chance, however fleeting, to encounter local culture and geography. The meandering Brisbane River adds confusion to its geography, but once you see the patterns from both the pavements and the river, the overall pattern of the city settles on your brain. You meet families on a day out, business people with time between meetings to take a slightly longer route, by any journey on water is more attractive than the city streets. On the train in a few hours time I will hear many accents and see people from all aspects of Brisbane society. If I went around in taxis I would have no sense of how one location relates to another, or the areas change in style and ambiance.”

Over the years I’ve done my share of traveling, both within the United States and around the world. It can be a privilege (oh, joy!) or a curse (aarrgh!), depending on your point of view and accumulated experiences, but for me travel is an opportunity to change the routine and get out of the box my life normally tries to fall into.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with routine, mind you. Routines can and do make life simpler. I just don’t want them to smother me like nuclear-irradiated mutant ivy from the planet of Zendar.)

Dave’s words brought to mind a three-month assignment I had in the city of Hsin-Chu, Taiwan (pictured above) during the winter of 2000. The company hired a driver for my daily trip from hotel (which was just outside of town) to work and back every weekday, and at first I enjoyed being able to sit back and watch the entertaining scenery go by. (I mean, c’mon – how often does a born and bred city-dweller like me get to see a truckload of live ducks go by? Practically… um, never!) On weekends I used taxis to get around because the hotel was not within walking distance of anything interesting.

Within a few weeks I’d pretty much memorized the landmarks along my usual routes, but unfortunately I still had no real sense of where I was in relation to the rest of the city. It wasn’t that I wanted to drive myself around (which from all accounts would have been a very BAD decision!) It’s just that the places where I worked, lived, ate and shopped were like unconnected bubbles, with no knowledge of how they were related to each other.

(You know, it occurs to me that sometimes we can let our lives get like that. We go to church, we go to work, we go to our friends’ homes – and yet these places are like those unconnected bubbles: comfortable familiarity within, but nothing in between.)

Anyway, after a while the isolation started getting to me, so I asked the client to move me to a hotel downtown. Although it was a considerable “step down” in accommodations, suddenly I was in the middle of things, and what a difference! For instance, just two blocks away was the SOGO (a department store similar to Macy’s but packed into a narrow fourteen-story building), whose top floor became my favorite hangout for two reasons: it had an extensive food court, and the surrounding view was incredible.

On my first visit, after carefully selecting an exotic foreign cuisine lunch (a three-piece Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner and Haagen-Daaz ice cream, thank you very much), I spent considerable time just looking out at the city. Almost immediately I spotted many of the landmarks I was familiar with, and suddenly I experienced a genuine paradigm shift: instead of unconnected bubbles, the entire city became like an interconnected map laid out before me in 1-to-1 scale! It became easy to see the places I was familiar with in relation to each other.

From then on, I went walking at least a few hours a day after work (because, you know, they would have been displeased if I had gone walking during work). Every day I’d pick a different direction, stop at some small restaurant for dinner, sometimes even enter a store or two to window shop; but for the most part I just spent the time absorbing the ebb and flow of life around me. During Chinese New Year (the last two weeks in January that year), many of the downtown streets were closed to traffic, and filled with street markets (essentially becoming a giant, sprawling flea market).

What an experience! It was rich; it was full, and I would have totally missed out had I not purposed to get out and see what there was to see. So I can heartily second Dave’s recommendation: when you’re in a new place and you have the opportunity, take the time to get out there and really experience it.