Monday Love to your Sense of Scale

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”

?~?Aldous Huxley

Have you ever noticed how small a city feels when you’re popping up out of the subway system?

Or how small the world feels when you get off of a jet plane and suddenly everyone speaking a different language?

London, Paris, New York — cities like this have robust transit systems that have a way of obscuring their scale. You find yourself in a neighborhood having a snack or visiting a friend, and when it’s time to go to a different part of the city, you go down some stairs or an escalator, step onto a swiftly moving train for some interval of time, and emerge back to the surface in another neighborhood not so different from the one you just left.

Car-centric cities on the other hand, impose their sense of scale upon you by default. Distances are usually referred to in terms of time with a caveat for congestion. “We live 20 minutes from downtown, more like an hour in traffic.” Trains, for the most part, have a way of predictably running on time.

Last week in London, I really felt the compression of the space time continuum brought forth by good transit. Being the biggest city in Western Europe, it’s quite spread out. Spend 20 minutes on the tube and you can cover a lot of ground on the map.

We zipped across the city underneath the streets and then took the boat back on the Thames which is a great way to see the city and sense its scale. They have these massive water taxis that ferry passengers back and forth that operate seamlessly with the same system as the underground and overground trains.

My current journey started with BART in the Bay Area and will conclude with the TGV in France, with SAS and Air France in between. I’m putting this note together in between with the generous use of WiFi hotspots along the way.

While a good metro system might make a big city seem small, stepping into a foreign airport makes the world feel large indeed.

K?benhavn was my stopover this time and right out of the gate it’s obvious that the culture is much different than the West Coast or France. There’s a universal language to international airports, yet the atmosphere and the ambient chatter differs everywhere you go.

I will say this, however, if you find yourself at the K?benhavn airport, you won’t go hungry! The Danes offer the greatest selection of airport shopping and dining I’ve seen outside of Singapore.

One might think of the world like a fractal, it tends to shrink or expand depending on your point of view. Let your locality be your locus, and zoom in or out as you will!

Leaving you with some simple travel observations today, much love until next Monday!

M+

ML?#618

Mark Metz Director of the?Dance First Association

Publisher of?Conscious Dancer Magazine

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Monday Love is the weekly inspirational newsletter written by Mark Metz, publisher of Conscious Dancer and director of the Dance First Association. Join our mailing list and learn about membership at www.consciousdancer.com