When I was little, my parents used to take me to the zoo. I loved it. I still love it. According to family legend, my parents would bring me to the habitats of the lions or the elephants and I would squeal with delight, having spotted a row of ants marching along the sidewalk. I have learned to appreciate the grandiose since then, but to this day one of my favorite parts of traveling is the insignificant, everyday differences between what I’m used to and what is normative in the new place I’m visiting. When people say, “What have you seen in Hamburg?” it’s hard for me not to gush about how I saw the sun through the young leaves, the brick-paved bike paths, or the idiosyncratic way Germans write the number one.

One of my favorite things to do when I travel anywhere is to visit a drugstore and a grocery store, because that to me is where life happens. (I think I have a particular love for grocery stores because I read Don DeLillo’s White Noise, wherein the character Murray finds great spiritual meaning in grocery stores, as an impressionable youth.) Between cases of liter bottles of mineral water, eggs sold 10 at a time, and grocery bags that cost five cents apiece, German grocery stores did not disappoint.

you had one job

This semester was my first cities course, and in the context of the 360 I learned all about how the shape and architecture of a city can change a person or community’s experience within it. During this trip I enjoyed observing a kind of micro-architecture that has shaped my time in the city. The weight and sound of euros in my pocket, the political stickering on the telephone poles in my neighborhood, the coveralls worn my construction workers around the city all filled every place I’ve visited with a distinctive spirit of Europe, Germany, and Hamburg.

In the Art of Exile course in the 360, we read Nabokov’s Guide to Berlin, wherein the protagonist shows his companion sites of the city that include construction, pipes, trolleys, and delivery boys on bicycles. At the end of the story, his companion claims it is a poor guide, but I think I get where he’s coming from. The texture of the pavement, the sing-song cacophony of Germany voices, the smell of the Elbe, and other details that fill days that are not particularly special are often the real essence of a place.