footnotes

You never know how much your confidence is based on familiarity with your surroundings until you leave and move somewhere else where everything is unfamiliar. Everyone seems to dress differently, talk differently, and makes you feel like you're at your first day of school all over again. What you did in the previous destination now seems inadequate in this new place you find yourself in.

You recognize the outline of things - cafes, road signs, people, but everything doesn't make sense. Menus, words written on road signs, and the words that come out of peoples mouths. When you look around, everyone seems to have a certain flow to the way they handle their city. The crisply dressed folk with dignified haircuts remain undisturbed by the slightly less crisp breeze against them.

You feel new to this city, but this city also feels new to you. The city has nooks and corners that will show you a nice coffee shop, with a nice barista, who you can have a chat to and suggest where you should try some good food that night. Everything is still in a commotion, but this encounter is slowed down and you feel as if the city is slightly opening up to your arrival.

As friendly faces in line at a grocery store start a small conversation with you, you start to feel more apart of the city. When you run back in after finishing another bar of chocolate, the shop keeper will remember your name. You introduce yourself to people you meet - and next time you see them, they actually remember your name. The familiarity of your new surrounding makes you feel warm as the city wraps itself around you. You get a sense of achievement of noticing the familiar faces in line at your now local cafe.

“A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.” 

― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita